Gods Go Begging (39 page)

There were families out there in that grass, families with a powerful linguistic memory of the Cote d‘lvoire and the Costa de los Es clavos still lingering on their tongues. Glottal stops were hidden within their exclamations and their sobs. Families lived out there in small shacks crowded with numbing despair and starving children. Their lives were lived just above the whim of the tides.

There were working men out there who did battle with the infertile soils and with the murky, fishless waters, men who had no work to do, and young but never youthful mothers out there whose hips bore both the agony and ennui of those men. There were human bodies out there, striated and worn. There were children out there—fecund girl children who were available for marriage, but at a price.

The sweet daughter of Cinesias Williams was out there. The old man’s right hand reached down into his coat pocket. He felt the manila envelope there, enough money for an unemployed father to buy a motorboat. Enough money for Cinesias to abandon his wife, those children, and those godforsaken islands forever.

“So tell us about this woman,” said Persephone. “You said she comes from Atlanta and her family owns a grocery store.”

“A couple of stores, maybe even a chain of them,” retorted the old man angrily. It was a bald-faced lie and he sensed that Persephone knew it.

“She don’t need my money, if that’s what you’re thinking.
Elle est trés riche. Trés beaucoup d‘argent!
She don’t need a single red cent from me. Not a red cent.”

The old man pulled a cigar from his jacket pocket and lit it with indignation. Persephone reached for a nearby spray bottle and doused the flame with equal fervor.

“We’re just curious, Papa,” said Persephone. “You never say anything about this mystery lady, not a single word. She must be somewhat younger than you are or you wouldn’t have asked us to do this rather extensive makeover for you.
Comment s‘appelle? Quelleâge? Racontez, vite!
Is she sixty-five, seventy?”

“Leave him be!” cried the chorus of old men.

“Mind your own business,” retorted the chorus of women.

The old man said nothing. The soggy cigar hung limp from his teeth. Persephone tilted his head to the left, then grabbed an entire bunch of ear hairs with the tweezers. She jerked them out of his head like so many radishes from the ground and he reacted by whimpering and pulling his head away. She was angry at her father, but grabbed a towel to dab at the blood in his ear. She then leaned down to whisper.

“Je t‘aime, Papa.
We all love you. Don’t you think we have a right to know? ”

“You’ll meet her when the time comes,” said the old man, who turned his ear away from his daughter’s lips. In truth, he hoped that the time would never come. He was sure it never would. These daughters of his departed wife would be unmerciful in their disgust and revulsion if they ever found out their father had taken a child bride. They would make his life into living hell if they ever discovered that he’d paid money for her.

He sighed anxiously to himself. There was a growing feeling of finality to this gathering. If he was lucky, these four domineering daughters would never again visit him in this lifetime. They would go back to Athens, Georgia, and to Sparta, New York. They were just like their dear mother, and thank God, their mother was dead. For good and all, he was through with strong women.

As Persephone softly rubbed away the furrows that had appeared on his brow, the old man closed his eyes and began once more to dream of the Frenchwoman. He had always intended to return to France to find her, but never did. The memory of that glorious day had almost died away. In order to spark an accurate picture of her in the remaining neurons of his mind, he began, once again, to dream a dream of war.

Persephone Flyer would be flying back to San Francisco in the morning. All four sisters had left their father to his new hair and face, and were gathered around the kitchen table to both celebrate and mourn her departure.

Meanwhile, the old man was off with his comrades. They were in the parlor drinking, recalling battles in the French countryside and passing around a photo of the girl-child of Cinesias Williams. The old men were giggling and snickering over the length of her knobby legs and the merest hint of breasts beneath a flour-sack dress. Priapus Boudreaux cast a nervous glance toward his youngest daughter. It was Persephone whom he feared the most.

In the kitchen, Persephone felt her father’s probing glance, but her mind was elsewhere. In the left cup of Persephone’s brassiere were two envelopes. She had forgotten about them for most of the evening, but now they chafed her skin as the anticipation grew. She had carried them on the plane from the West Coast. The postmark on the first letter indicated that it had been mailed from Seattle.

The second was an official dispatch from the Department of the Army. Would this be their final letter to her? Had they at last located his body? Had some Vietnamese farmer run across his Creole rib cage and his dog tags while plowing a field? For some reason she hadn’t wanted to read them until she was safely in the family home and surrounded by her own flesh and blood.

With her sisters beside her, silent and breathless, she carefully opened the first envelope. At first she tried to open it along the flap, but she grew impatient, and in a fit of pique, tore it open. The letter inside was the second carbon copy. The original was in Washington. The third and fourth carbons were suffocating somewhere in the bowels of some far-flung army post that was charged with generating such documents.

“He’s still listed as missing in action.” She sighed. She considered crying but held back her tears. It was certainly far better than a “killed in action” designation, or a “missing in action and presumed dead.” Years from now, other letters would come bearing just those designations. Her sisters moved about her, touching her shoulders and kissing her cheek with delicacy and experience. It was better than killed in action, their fingers and lips repeated. Better than KIA.

“Good-for-nothing man will be back on your front porch in no time,” said one of the sisters. “Pretty soon you’ll wish he was back in the army. When he comes back, tell him he ain’t never gonna get none of that good loving of yours if he stays a soldier.”

“That’s right,” echoed another sister. “Don’t give him no sexual favors unless he swears on the Good Book to stay home with you. Be as cold as ice to him, and never stir a limb. He’ll stay home. You better believe he will.”

“He’s missing, that’s all, just missing,” said the sister with one breast. “All you need is one good letter. The next letter will be better. It’ll be the news you’re waiting for. Who is the second letter from?”

“There’s no return address,” answered Persephone, “but this handwriting has to be a woman’s.”

She sniffed the envelope, then passed it around for the others to peruse. She was relieved to find that there was no perfume on the paper.

“It has to be a woman’s.”

For a moment there was a hint of panic in her voice. Could it be possible that some strange woman in Seattle knew something about the fate of her Sergeant Amos Flyer? Had she met him on a rest-and-recuperation junket to Singapore or Saigon? Did they have sex, or worse, did they make love? Did they laugh between the sheets? Did they make love at night and in the morning, too, the way that she and Amos had when they first met? How on earth did she get my old address in San Francisco? The envelope had been addressed to her old apartment. The manager there, an old friend, had forwarded it to Persephone’s new home.

Slowly, carefully, she opened the envelope. Somehow Persephone was certain that this letter would have more to say about her husband than the first. Steeped in anticipation, her three sisters held their cups of tea in the air before their lips as she slowly tore at the seal. All they would dare taste at a time like this was hope and expectation. They all sighed in unison when they saw the number of pages contained in the letter—at least a dozen. Would the information be hidden, couched in innuendos or sequestered carefully in the code that mistresses used when they communicated with wives? Still frozen with ceramic cups filled with orange pekoe hovering in front of their faces, they waited in silence until Persephone finished the final page, then folded the letter back into its envelope.

She dropped the letter into her purse, then began to weep softly, her face in her hands. Then she lifted her head to face her impatient sisters.

“Remember when you girls would do my makeup for me?” She smiled. “Remember when you would dress me for school and comb my hair for me? You”—she pointed to her oldest sister—“helped me put on my first pair of pantyhose, and you taught me how to coordinate my outfits. I never seemed to be able to pick out my own clothing. As you can see, I can’t choose outfits for myself.”

She gestured toward the clothing that hung from her body.

“The next time I come home, maybe the three of you will dress me again, for old time’s sake. Perhaps it’ll be for my Amos’s home-coming. You all remember how scared I was when I got my first period?” Persephone’s voice broke as joy gave way to heartfelt sincerity. “My sisters have always been there for me, no matter what.
Je vous aime tant.”

She rose from her chair and moved from one sister to the next, embracing them each in turn. As she hugged each one she whispered into an ear, “Finally, after all of this time, we have word from Amos.”

The sisters rose from their chairs, one after the other, their teacups and saucers dropping and spilling and shattering. The tea would stain the floor for years. Not even Priapus’s child bride, on her hands and knees for three full hours, would be able to scrub away the discoloration.

“My lover’s words are written upon a forearm. Mes
soeurs,
we have another sister.”

Clearly impatient to begin her flight to the West Coast, she clutched the precious letter to her bosom. There was a woman in this world—a stranger who would become more familiar than family—a woman who had cut Persephone’s name and old address into her arm, a woman who was suffering the same sadness and love, a woman who was living in Seattle.

She glanced toward her father, who was with his friends on the other side of the house, dreaming of the scorched metal scent of artillery pieces and the soft, sizzling sound of burning white phosphorus. To her amazement, Persephone noticed a bulge in her old father’s pants. Either the old fool had hidden a lance in his clothing or the septuagenarian was having an erection.

“If the old fool chooses someone who is underage,” she said suspiciously, “we should think seriously about putting him in a home.”

The two women did not know each other immediately. Each had imagined the face of the other in a hundred ways. So, for a time, they stood in the crowded United Airlines gate casting nervous glances in every possible direction. The force of the crowd—the hurried and the harried, the disembarking passengers and the loved ones who ran to meet them—forced the two women to within arm’s length of each other. At one point their shoulder bags accidentally collided. At another point they jostled each other, back to back, the smaller woman’s shoulder blades cupped in the small of Persephone’s back.

Eventually they brushed past each other, their hands barely touching. Now earnest inadvertence yielded to unconscious intention. Lovely Mai, in high heels, stumbled near the edge of a carpet and found, as if by accident, Persephone’s brown hand to give her balance and stability. Now a flurry of polite excuses and apologies gave way to long minutes of rapt attention as platoons of passengers swelled and faded in the background.

The first sight of the other seemed to be the confirmation of something already known deep in the heart: loneliness can recognize itself. Persephone and Mai stood staring at each other as one hundred eighty tickets were presented at the gate and given seating assignment. They stood mutely as the plane was filled and lifted noisily into the sky above their heads.

The two women, thrilled at the touch of the other, embraced shamelessly and silently at gate 79 of the United terminal. They then walked, hand in hand, without words toward Persephone’s car and toward the rest of their lives together. The conversation about Amos and Trin could wait. The information was so scant. Without saying a word, they had reached an agreement, an accord.

They would discover pieces of the secret in tidbits, offhand remarks and casual slips of the tongue. Things would be blurted out, and they would share bittersweet hours of stunned, contemplative silence. Together they would learn to cook. Personal griefs and recollections would be measured, spiced, and mixed together in the course of a thousand recipes. Inexorably, the secrets would leak out over time as shattering moments of insight and regret—in soufflés that collapsed in the oven and in cassoulets that soared in taste and texture. At other times they would ooze out with the viscous perfection of poured honey.

Mai had lost a husband who could make her feel this way, a man who could do things to her—Vietnamese male things, things of smear and spittle and flying thighs. Over time she would admit that there had been another man, a man who was no one at all. Persephone had lost a man who could do these other things to her, Creole things of muscle and thrust. Both men … all three men could speak into their woman’s legs, calling out the sweetest of beasts.

Now and again, in the remaining years that they had, each woman would demonstrate what love had once been by taking the part of the other woman’s man. Each would learn to see what the male lover had seen, and far beyond. In the darkness of bedrooms in the Mission District and in Bernal Heights, each woman would become husband to the other, a pair of hands in the opaque blackness probing and sliding softly from secret place to private place, from outcropping to inlet, a craving pair of lips tasting and pecking at flesh.

“Are we lesbians, honey, if I do for you what your man did—if you imagine your young soldier on top of you when I’m doing it? Not that I can do everything he could do, but
presque
tout, almost everything. God, my man could use his tongue! I love that Creole lingo. That’s it! Right there. You’ve got it. Now a little side to side. Oh, that feels so good. Amos, honey, why did you leave me? I can see your face,
mon
cher. Amos, you could always taste me like no man ever could. No man can inhale me like that. No man on earth. Oh God, Amos, is thatyou?”