Tar Baby (14 page)

“How much?” he asked her. “Was it a lot?” His voice was quiet.

“What are you talking about? How much what?”

“Dick. That you had to suck, I mean to get all that gold and be in the movies. Or was it pussy? I guess for models it’s more pussy than cock.” He wanted to go on and ask her was it true what the black whores always said, but she was hitting him in the face and on the top of his head with a badly formed fist and calling him an ignorant motherfucker with the accent on the syllable
ig
.

Jadine jumped away from the desk and leaned forward trying to kill him with her fists while her mind raced to places in the room where there might be a poker or a vase or a sharp pair of shears. He turned his head a little but did not raise his arms to protect himself. All he had to do was what he did: stand up and let his height put his face and head out of her easy reach. She stretched nonetheless trying to tear the whites from his eyes. He caught both her wrists and crossed them in front of her face. She spit full in his face but the saliva fell on the
C
of his pajama top. Her gold-thread slippers were no good for kicking but she kicked anyhow. He uncrossed her wrists and swung her around, holding her from behind in the vise of his arms. His chin was in her hair.

Jadine closed her eyes and pressed her knees together. “You smell,” she said. “You smell worse than anything I have ever smelled in my life.”

“Shh,” he whispered in her hair, “before I throw you out the window.”

“Valerian will kill you, ape. Sydney will chop you, slice you…”

“No, they won’t.”

“You rape me and they’ll feed you to the alligators. Count on it, nigger. You good as dead right now.”

“Rape? Why you little white girls always think somebody’s trying to rape you?”

“White?” She was startled out of fury. “I’m not…you know I’m not white!”

“No? Then why don’t you settle down and stop acting like it.”

“Oh, God,” she moaned. “Oh, good God, I think you better throw me out of the window because as soon as you let me loose I am going to kill you. For that alone. Just for that. For pulling that black-woman-white-woman shit on me. Never mind the rest. What you said before, that was nasty and mean, but if you think you can get away with telling me what a black woman is or ought to be…”

“I
can
tell you.” He nestled his cheek in her hair as she struggled in his arms.

“You
can’t,
you ugly barefoot baboon! Just because you’re black you think you can come in here and give me orders? Sydney was right. He should have shot you on the spot. But no. A white man thought you were a human being and should be treated like one. He’s civilized and made the mistake of thinking you might be too. That’s because he didn’t smell you. But I did and I know you’re an animal because I smell you.”

He rubbed his chin in her hair and blew at the little strand over her ears. “I smell you too,” he said, and pressed his loins as far as he could into the muted print of her Madeira skirt. “I smell you too.”

His voice was soft, breathy and seemed to her to come from a great height. Someplace far far up, higher than the ceiling, higher than the ake trees even and it frightened her. “Let me go,” she said, surprised at the steadiness of her own voice and even more surprised that he did it.

She stood with her back to him, rubbing her wrists. “I’ll have to tell Valerian.”

He didn’t say anything so she turned to face him and repeated, “I’ll have to tell Valerian.”

He nodded. “Tell him,” he said. “All of it or part of it. Whatever you like.”

“I will,” she said, and started walking toward the door, clicking her gold-thread slippers on the tile.

“Except for one thing,” he said. “Leave out one thing. Don’t tell him that I smelled you.”

She walked out the door and down the hall. She meant to go to the downstairs powder room and clean him off her, but she didn’t want to stop walking just yet, so she descended the staircase, crossed the front hall and opened the door. The gravel of the driveway hurt her feet in the little gold-thread slippers, but she went on, rubbing her wrists, feeling frightened and then angry, then frightened then angry again. When she got to the end of the drive, she stepped with relief onto the gravel-free macadam and continued until she came to a large stone by the side of the road. She sat down on it under the eyes of an avocado tree and lifted the hem of her skirt to wipe her face. She would tell Valerian to get rid of him that very afternoon. He would go and that would be that. A minor episode in an otherwise uneventful winter in the Caribbean. Something to chat about at supper, to elaborate on with friends, and laugh and laugh and say, “Can you believe it? He was in the house all that time! And when we found him, we invited him to dinner where he sat down and poured the coffee into his saucer and said ‘Hi’ to the butler. Ha ha, you should have seen Sydney’s face and Margaret was out of her mind, but Valerian was superb, as you might guess, you know Valerian, right? Totally unflappable. Totally! But I was about to wet my pants, right?…and later…” But no. She would not tell that part, although it was funny, especially about how he asked her did Catherine the Great give her those earrings (he actually believed it, that they had belonged to the empress), and how he kept fingering her pictures, but she couldn’t tell about the question he asked her: how much did she have to suck. She would make it some other impudence so she could get to the part about smashing his face and his trying to rape her, and maybe she could say that he was so dumb and country he thought she was white probably because she had a bath that morning and didn’t have any hoops in her ears, and that he didn’t want to rape her after all, but was content just to smell her. No, she’d leave out the smelling part. She would not mention that part at all.

Jadine felt the fear again and another thing that wasn’t fear. Something more like shame. Because he was holding my wrists so tight and pressing himself into my behind? God, what a nasty motherfucker. Really nasty. Stink nasty. Maybe that was it. His smell. Other men had done worse to her and tried worse but she was always able to talk about it and think about it with appropriate disgust and amusement. But not this. He had jangled something in her that was so repulsive, so awful, and he had managed to make her feel that the thing that repelled her was not in him, but in her. That was why she was ashamed. He was the one who smelled. Rife, ripe. But she was the one he wanted to smell. Like an animal. Treating her like another animal and both of them must have looked just like it in that room. One dog sniffing at the hindquarters of another, and the female, her back to him, not moving, but letting herself be sniffed, letting him nuzzle her asshole as the man had nuzzled hers, the bitch never minding that the male never looked in her face or ran by her side or that he had just come up out of nowhere, smelled her ass and stuck his penis in, humping and jerking and grinding away while she stood there bearing, actually
bearing
his whole weight as he pummeled around inside her not even speaking, or barking, his eyes sliced and his mouth open and dripping with saliva, and other dogs too, waiting, circling until the engaged dog was through and then they would mount her also in the street in broad daylight no less, not even under a tree or behind a bush, but right there on Morgan Street in Baltimore with cars running by and children playing and the retired postman coming out of his house in his undershirt shouting get that bitch out of here. She’s in heat. Lock that bitch up. Every goddamn dog in town’ll be over here and he went back inside to get a mop handle to run the males off and crack the bitch over the back and send her home, she who had done nothing but be “in heat” which she couldn’t help but which was her fault just the same so it was she who was beaten and cracked over the head and spine with the mop handle and made to run away and I felt sorry for her and went looking for her to see if she was hurt and when I found her she was behind the gas station standing very quietly while another dog sniffed her ass embarrassing me in the sunlight.

All around her it was like that: a fast crack on the head if you let the hunger show so she decided then and there at the age of twelve in Baltimore never to be broken in the hands of any man. Whatever it took—knife blades or screaming teeth—Never. And yes, she would tap dance, and yes, she would skate, but she would do it with a frown, pugnacious lips and scary eyes, because Never. And anybody who wanted nice from this little colored girl would have to get it with pliers and chloroform, because Never. When her mother died and she went to Philadelphia and then away to school, she was so quick to learn, but no touchee, teacher, and no, I do not smile, because Never. It smoothed out a little as she grew older. The pugnacious lips became a seductive pout—eyes more heated than scary. But beneath the easy manners was a claw always ready to rein in the dogs, because Never.

“Tell him,” he said. “Tell him anything but don’t tell him I smelled you because then he would understand that there was something in you
to
smell and that I smelled it and if Valerian understands that then he will understand everything and even if he makes me go away he will still know that there is something in you to be smelled which I have discovered and smelled myself. And no sealskin coat or million-dollar earrings can disguise it.”

You son of a bitch I need this like a wart. I came here to get some rest and have some peace and find out if I really wanted to kick my legs up on a runway and let buyers with Binaca breath lick my ears or if I wanted to roam around Europe instead, following soccer games for the rest of my life and looking for another Bezzi or if I should buy an Alfa and drive through Rome making the scene where producers and agents can see me and say
Cara mia
is it really you I have just the part!

I came here to do some serious thinking and the fact is that I
can
come here. I belong here. You, motherfucker, do not and you, motherfucker, are leaving now as soon as I tell Valerian what you did to me and the harbor police will be here and return you to the sharks where you belong. Damn Valerian, what does he think he’s doing? Playing white people’s games? Or what the hell is the matter with him? He sits there and complains about Margaret, practically breaks down thinking about his son and talks about how he loves them both and has sacrificed everything for their happiness and then watches her go crazy, she’s so scared. And instead of protecting her or at least getting upset he invites the very thing that scared the shit out of her to dinner and lets him sleep down the hall from us all. Doesn’t he know the difference between one Black and another or does he think we’re all…Some mess this is.

Jadine cupped her elbows in her palms and rocked back and forth on the stone trying hard to pull herself together before she went back to talk to Valerian, to tell him he and his joke had gone too far and might backfire. She sat for a long time, longer than necessary since she had already made up her mind. She started to stand several times, but each time something held her to the rock. Something very like embarrassment. Embarrassment at the possibility of overreacting, as she told her aunt and uncle they were doing. More awful than the fear of danger was the fear of looking foolish—of being excited when others were laid back—of being somehow manipulated, surprised or shook. Sensitive people went into therapy and stayed there when they felt out of control. Was this really a funny story she could tell later or was there real danger? But there was more. She felt a curious embarrassment in the picture of herself telling on a black man to a white man and then watching those red-necked gendarmes zoom him away in a boat. But he was going to rape her; maybe Margaret too, or worse. She couldn’t wait for Valerian to get bored or sober or come to his senses and she couldn’t risk hanging loose in this place where there was no one really to call on, where they were virtually alone. It would have to be done now, in the light of day. There was no betrayal in that. That nigger knew better and if he didn’t he was crazy and needed to be hauled away.

Besides that fear and the fear of fear, there was another authentic loathing that she felt for the man. With him she was in strange waters. She had not seen a Black like him in ten years. Not since Morgan Street. After that in the college she attended the black men were either creeps or so rare and desirable they had every girl in a 150-mile radius at their feet. She was barely noticeable in (and never selected from) that stampede. Later when she traveled her society included Blacks and whites in profusion, but the black people she knew wanted what she wanted—either steadily and carefully like Sydney and Ondine or uproariously and flashily like theater or media types. But whatever their scam, “making it” was on their minds and they played the game with house cards, each deck issued and dealt by the house. With white people the rules were even simpler. She needed only to be stunning, and to convince them she was not as smart as they were. Say the obvious, ask stupid questions, laugh with abandon, look interested, and light up at any display of their humanity if they showed it. Most of it required only charm—occasionally panache. None of it called for this…this…

“Oh, horseshit!” she said aloud. It couldn’t be worth all this rumination, she thought, and stood up. The avocado tree standing by the side of the road heard her and, having really seen a horse’s shit, thought she had probably misused the word. Jadine dusted off the back of her skirt and turned toward the house. The avocado tree watched her go then folded its leaves tightly over its fruit. When Jade got near the greenhouse she thought she saw two figures behind the translucent panes. One was gesticulating wildly. Her heart pounding, she raced to the open door and peeped in. There they were. Valerian and the man, both laughing to beat the band.

5

“L
AUGHING
?” Margaret could not believe her ears.

“I’m telling you! They were in there laughing! I was looking right at them when you called out the window.”

“Good God. What’s gotten into him?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you scared?”

“Not really. Well, sort of.”

“You don’t know him, do you?”

“
Know
him? How would I know him?”

“I don’t know. This is making me crazy. Maybe we should do something.”

“What? We’re the only women. And Ondine. Should I go to the Broughtons’ and…” Jadine stopped and sat down on Margaret’s bed. She shook her head. “This is too much.”

“What did he say?” asked Margaret. “When you all had dinner? Did he say what he was doing here?”

“Oh, he said he was hiding. That he’d been looking for food after he jumped ship a few days ago. That he was trying to get something out of the kitchen and heard footsteps and ran up the stairs to hide. Apparently he didn’t know what room he went into, he was just waiting for a chance to get back out.”

“Do you believe him?”

“I believe some of it. I mean I don’t believe he came here to rape you.” (Me, maybe, she thought, but not you.)

“How did he get here?”

“He says he swam.”

“That’s impossible.”

“It’s what he said.”

“Well, then he can swim back. Now. Today. I’m not going to sleep with him in this house. If I had known that I would have had a heart attack. All night I waited for that bastard Valerian to come up here and tell me what the hell was going on. He never showed.”

“And Sydney was patrolling the halls with a gun. I thought he would have killed him by now.”

“What does he think?”

“He’s angry. Ondine’s scared, I think.”

“I’m going to have it out with Valerian. He’s doing this just to ruin Christmas for me. Michael’s coming and he knows I want everything right for him, and look what he does to get me upset. Instead of throwing that…that…”

“Nigger.”

“Right, nigger, instead of throwing him right out of here.”

“Maybe we’re making something out of nothing.”

“Jade. He was in my closet. He had my box of souvenirs in his lap.”

“Open?”

“No. Not open. Just sitting there holding it. He must have picked them up from the floor. Oh, God, he scared the shit out of me. He looked like a gorilla!”

Jadine’s neck prickled at the description. She had volunteered nigger—but not gorilla. “We were all scared, Margaret,” she said calmly. “If he’d been white we would still have been scared.”

“I know, I know.”

“Look. Valerian let him in. Valerian has to get him out. I’m sure he will anyway but you talk to him and I will too. It will be all right. You want to calm down. Let’s do the breathing exercises. Cool out.”

“I don’t want to breathe, we have to
do
something. We can’t leave it up to Valerian. Listen, let’s leave: take the boat to town and fly to Miami. We won’t come back till he’s gone. Oh, but Michael!” She touched her hair. “I’ll telephone him. He can meet us in Miami and if Valerian’s got his senses back…”

“But it’s the twenty-second. There isn’t time. And what about Sydney and Ondine?”

“You don’t think he’d go after Ondine, do you? Well, we’ll start. We’ll look like we’re going and tell Valerian why. We can call the police ourselves when we get to town. Is the boy here?” Margaret asked.

“Yes, but—”

“Jade. Come on, now. You’ve got to help. There’s nobody else.”

“Let’s see if Valerian will send him away.”

“You said they were in there laughing.”

“Let’s wait and see. Pack just in case. I’ll get reservations.”

“All right. But I’m not going to leave this room until I know something definite.”

“I’ll bring you something to eat.”

“Yes, and please hurry. I don’t want to take a Valium on an empty stomach.”

They stayed in their rooms all afternoon, and the next time they saw the stranger he was so beautiful they forgot all about their plans.

W
HEN
J
ADINE
had clicked out of her bedroom in her gold-thread slippers, the man sat down in her chair and lit another cigarette. He listened to the four/four time of her clicking shoes, tapping it out on the little writing table. The seat was too small for him—like a grade school chair—even though he had lost the ship-food weight and now—after two weeks of scavenging—his body was as lean as a runner’s. He glanced around him and was surprised at how uncomfortable-looking her room was. Not at all the way it appeared at dawn when he crouched there watching her sleep and trying to change her dreams. Then it looked mysterious but welcoming. Now in the noon light it looked fragile—like a doll house for an absent doll—except for the sealskin coat sprawled on her bed which looked more alive than seals themselves. He had seen them gliding like shadows in water off the coast of Greenland, moving like supple rocks on pebbly shores, and never had they looked so alive as they did now that their insides were gone: lambs, chickens, tuna, children—he had seen them all die by the ton. There was nothing like it in the world, except the slaughter of whole families in their sleep and he had seen that, too.

He took another cigarette and walked to a table to look at the presents she’d started to wrap. Two damp spots formed on the yoke of his pajamas. Still smoking, he left off looking at the packages and walked into her bathroom. Peeping into the shower he saw a fixture exactly like the one in the bathroom down the hall. But her shower had curtains, not sliding doors. Heavy shiny curtains with pictures of old-fashioned ladies all over. Towel material was on the other side, still damp. Water glistened on the tub and wall tile. On the corner of the tub was a bottle of Neutrogena Rainbath Gel and a natural sponge, the same color as her skin. He picked up the sponge and squeezed it. Water gushed from the cavities. Careless, he thought. She should wring it out thoroughly, otherwise it would rot. The sponge was so large he wondered how her small hands held it. He squeezed it again, but lightly this time, loving the juice it gave him. Unbuttoning his pajama top he rubbed it on his chest and under his arms. Then he took the pajamas off altogether and stepped into the shower.

“Pull,” she had said. Tepid water hit him full in the face. He pushed the knob in and the water stopped. He adjusted the shower head, pulled again and water peppered his chest. After a moment he noticed that the shower head was removable and he lifted it from its clamps to let it play all over his skin. He never let go the sponge. When he was wet all over, he let the shower head dangle while he picked up the bath gel, pumping the spout above the sponge. He lathered himself generously and rinsed. The water that ran into the drain was dark—charcoal gray. As black as the sea before sunrise.

His feet were impossible. A thick crust scalloped his heels and the balls of both feet. His fingernails were long and caked with dirt. He lathered and rinsed twice before he felt as though he’d accomplished anything. The sponge felt good. He had never used one before. Always he had bathed with his own hands. Now he pumped a dollop of bath gel into his palm and soaped his beard, massaging as best he could with his nails. The beard hair tangled and crackled like lightning. He turned his soapy face up and sprayed water on it. Too hard. He stopped, wiped his eyes and fiddled with the head until he got mist instead of buckshot. He soaped his face again and misted the lather away. Some of it got into his mouth and reminded him of a flavor he could not name. He sprayed more and swallowed it. It did not taste like water; it tasted like milk. He squirted it all around in his mouth before pressing the button to shut off the water.

He got out dripping and looking around for shampoo. He was about to give up, not seeing any medicine cabinets, when he accidentally touched a mirror that gave way to reveal shelf upon shelf of bottles among which were several of shampoo boasting placenta protein among their ingredients. The man chose one and stood before the mirror looking at his hair. It spread like layer upon layer of wings from his head, more alive than the sealskin. It made him doubt that hair was in fact dead cells. Black people’s hair, in any case, was definitely alive. Left alone and untended it was like foliage and from a distance it looked like nothing less than the crown of a deciduous tree. He knew perfectly well what it was that had frightened her, paralyzed her for a moment. He could still see those minky eyes frozen wide in the mirror. Now he stuck his head under the shower and wet the hair till it fell like a pelt over his ears and temples. Then he soaped and rinsed, soaped and rinsed until it was as metallic and springy as new wire. After he dried it, he found a toothbrush and brushed his teeth furiously. Rinsing his mouth he noticed blood. He was bleeding from the gums of his perfect teeth. He unscrewed the cap from a bottle of Listerine with instructions in French on the label and gargled. Finally he wrapped a white towel around his waist. He noticed another door in the bathroom and opened it with the easy familiarity of someone who has been there before. It led to a dressing room within an alcove in which stood a table and a mirror circled by lights. Farther along were dresses, shelves of shoe boxes, luggage, and a narrow lingerie chest. On a tiny chair lay shorts and a white tennis visor. The smell of perfume nauseated him—he had not eaten since the gobbling of cold soufflé and peaches the night before. He picked a robe, returned to the bathroom and urinated. Then he stooped to pick up the pajamas, damp and bunched on the floor, but changed his mind, left them there and walked back through the bedroom. The breeze from the open window was sweet and he went to it and stood looking out.

They are frightened, he thought. All but the old man. The old man knows that whatever I jumped ship for it wasn’t because I wanted to rape a woman. Women were not on his mind and however strange it looked, he had not followed the women. He didn’t even see them properly. When the boat docked, he stayed in the closet. Their voices were as light as their feet pattering on the dock and when he went, at last, to look, all he saw were two slim-backed women floating behind the beam of a flashlight toward what looked like a jeep. They got in, turned on the lights, then the engine (in that order, just like women would) and were gone. It amused him that these tiny women had handled that big boat. Which one had thrown the rope? Who jumped onto the dock and secured the line? He had not seen them clearly at all: just the hand and left side of one as she picked a bottle off the deck, and now their slim backs disappearing into the darkness toward a jeep. He had not followed them. He didn’t even know where they were off to. He waited until the sea, the fish, the waves all shut up and the only sound came from the island. When he had eaten mustard, flat bread and the last of the bottled water he too disembarked but not before he looked up at the sky holy with stars and inhaled the land smell sailors always swear they love. Behind him to his right the dim lights of Queen of France. Before him a dark shore. Ahead, under the stars and above the black of the beach he could barely see the hilly outline of the island against the sky.

He walked along the dock and then over forty feet of sand past the shadow of something that looked like a gasoline pump to the road the jeep had taken. He stayed on it and hoped he wouldn’t meet anybody, for, having lost his shoes, he was not willing to cut through the bush, fat and tangled, by the side of the road. At every step clouds of mosquitoes surrounded him biting through his shirt and on the back of his neck. An old dread of mines chilled him—stopped him dead and he had to remind himself several times that this was the Caribbean—there were no beautiful pygmies in the trees or spring mines in the road.

He had not followed the women. He didn’t even know what they looked like or where they were going. He just walked for an hour on the only road there was and saw nothing to make him stop; nothing that appeared to offer rest. At some point during that hour a foul smell rose about him. But the mosquitoes left him and he supposed it was the fumes coming from a marsh or swamp that he imagined he was passing through. When he emerged from it he saw above him a house with lights in its upper and lower stories. He stopped and rested one hand against a tree. How cool and civilized the house looked. After that hot solitary walk through darkness lined by trees muttering in their sleep, how cool, clean and civilized it looked. They are drinking clear water in there, he thought, with ice cubes in it. He should have stayed on the boat for the night. But he’d been shipbound so long and the land smell was so good, so good. “I’d better go back,” he told himself. “Back to the boat where there is a refrigerator and ice cubes and a bunk.” He drew his tongue across his lips and felt the cracks. Moving his hand an inch or two up the tree in preparation to go his fingers grazed a breast, the tight-to-breaking breast of a pubescent girl three months pregnant. He snatched his hand away and turned to look. Then he let his breath out in a snort that was more relief than laughter. An avocado was hanging from the tree right at his fingertips and near his cheek. He parted the leaves and stroked it. Saved, he thought. It smelled like an avocado, felt like an avocado. But suppose it wasn’t. Suppose it was a variety of ake, the fruit that contained both a pulp that was edible and a poison that killed. No, he thought, ake trees are bigger, taller and their fruit would not grow so close to the trunk. He strained to see the color, but could not. He decided not to chance it and looked again at the house lights—the home lights—beaming like a safe port in front of him. Just then the wind, or perhaps it was the tree herself, lifted the leaves and, precisely as he had done a moment ago, parted wide the leaves. The avocado swung forward and touched his cheek. Why not? he thought, and placed three fingers on either side of the fruit and bit it where it hung. Under the tough bitter skin was the completely tasteless, wholly satisfying meat and it made him thirstier than he was before.

He had not followed the women. He had not even seen them clearly, only their slim backs. What he went toward the house for was a drink of water. To find an outside spigot; a well, a fountain, anything to quench a thirst brought on by mosquitoes, the hot night and the meat of a teenaged avocado.