Visible Empire, page 10
“Explain this to me again,” she said. She was fully dressed, though it was now well past four in the morning.
“Your husband gave me his number,” said the teenager.
One of the officers kneed him in the leg from behind. “We told you to stop talking.” The taller of the two officers said this; there was a large cyst at the tip of his nose.
“But you see,” said Lily, gesturing with her open palm, exposing the tiny bandage she’d placed at its center, “it’s only this boy who can explain things. You must let him talk if he’s going to explain.”
The boy said nothing.
“It’s like we told you,” the cystic officer said. “He claims the car belongs to you—”
“No,” said the Negro. He braced himself. When no kick came, he continued. “It belongs to a friend of Mr. Tucker. But they were together when they hired me.”
“A friend?”
“Coleman,” the Negro said. “Coleman something, ma’am. I couldn’t tell if it was a first name.”
As he spoke, Lily studied his face, his bloodied and as-yet-untended lip and eye. She held up her hand and pointed at the bandage on her palm. “I’ve hurt myself, too,” she said. “Though I suspect my phrasing’s a bit off. I suspect you didn’t precisely hurt yourself.”
Lily turned and walked to the living room window. She made her way without urgency. She imagined the three of them watching—her movements that of a shadow cast from a rain cloud overhead. Cupping her face to the glass, she could very easily make out P. T. Coleman’s 1960 Ford Thunderbird, its top down. Unmistakable. A beautiful automobile. She’d had sex with him once—before she was a married woman, but after the engagement to Robert—in the backseat. Even from the window, she could see the dent from where he’d once hit a dog. She couldn’t believe he hadn’t yet had it repaired. There was a time when, with little effort, she could picture quite easily what her life might have been if she’d chosen Coleman. Now, seven months pregnant, all she could conjure were phantoms—memories of memories of memories . . . When she thought of Coleman, she wasn’t sure if the image in her mind’s eye was of him or of her father or someone else. Perhaps, after all, it was Robert she was seeing. She couldn’t be certain. Only what was immediately in front of her was now identifiable; she felt confident only in what she could touch. Everything else was air.
She returned to the foyer and addressed the Negro directly.
“You say my husband gave you his telephone number?”
“Yes.”
She looked at the officers then back at the boy.
“You say he and Coleman hired you to return the car to Atlanta?”
“Yes.”
“You say that you drove them to an airport?”
“Yes and no, ma’am.”
The shorter of the two officers shoved the boy. He stumbled. “Don’t be clever,” the officer said. “Give her an answer.”
“You will refrain—” Lily opened her hand again. She rubbed her palm with her thumb. The wound was so fresh, yet already it seemed a compulsion to acknowledge it had already formed. “You will refrain from touching the boy again while you are in my house, on my property.”
The officer of the unfortunate blemish snorted.
“Explain,” she said. She was looking again at the teenager, who was taller than either officer. Why, she wondered, had he let himself be beaten by two such unremarkable goons? Even as she asked herself the question, she felt ashamed at the obviousness of the answer. She added, “Please.”
“It was a large field,” he said, “with a kind of street made of grass.”
He spread out his hands as if smoothing a sheet or performing a glissando across the keys of a piano. She followed the flight of his fingers; she could practically hear their music.
“A runway,” said Lily. She felt suddenly dizzy, warm-headed, woozy. At the periphery of her brain’s vision, she detected yet another phantom memory. If she turned to look, it would only jump away.
“I’ve never seen anything like it in my life,” the Negro said. He paused, perhaps not believing he wouldn’t again be hit. “But then, I’d never seen an airplane up close either. Not before tonight.”
Lily nodded.
“You can go now,” she said abruptly. She walked to the front door and opened it.
Outside, the cicadas vibrated, a thick chest-rattling call from the outdoors. Somewhere, a few streets down, an owl hooted in the night.
She held out her hand. “The keys to the Thunderbird, please.”
The taller officer put his hand in his pocket but didn’t then remove it. “If you aren’t pressing charges, then he’s no longer our responsibility.” He jangled the keys against the inside fabric of his pants. Lily regarded the noise. Next to the pocket was his bulge; she imagined something wizened, something more yellow than pink, something small. Perhaps there was another cyst there, too. “We won’t take him with us,” the man was saying. “You have to press charges if you want him to leave.” His hand was still in his pocket, his demeanor unnecessarily smug. He seemed to believe that in delivering this final bit of news—such insignificant news, another minuscule drop in the crater-sized bucket—he’d somehow won, that he’d somehow dominated her in her own domain.
Lily looked again at the bloodied face, the heavy-lidded eyes of the Negro. This was, she saw now, more a young man than a boy. Above his lip was a hint of stubble. He’d been shaving at least a year, maybe closer to two. She’d pegged him initially as a teen, but now she saw that he was very likely in his twenties, her own age perhaps, which made him indisputably a man. A man, then, and yet what could he do to her that hadn’t already been done? What additional indignity might he attempt?
“What’s your name?” she said.
“My name is Piedmont.”
She couldn’t help it. She smiled. “As in the park? Piedmont Park?”
“Yes, ma’am.” He looked at her shoulder when he spoke, as though eye contact would have been too difficult. She guessed he was embarrassed by his name. She wondered at this. Recently she was embarrassed by so many aspects of her own—the association that her surname had with Robert, but also, unexpectedly, newly, the mortification caused by her maiden name, as well. How wonderful to have a designation that might affiliate you to a place, to a large and beautiful expanse of earth, rather than to something so terrible as a mere person.
His focus on her shoulder remained so singular that she finally regarded it herself. When nothing amiss was there, she turned to see what beyond might have caught his attention. The chandelier’s glow glinted off the lid of her grandmother’s baby grand. She looked again at Piedmont, at his hands—unmistakably, she realized with a start, those of a pianist.
“I have to ask. Do you—” She wanted to distinguish herself from the officers. “Do you play?”
He raised his chin.
Their eyes caught for only a second, but in that tiny moment it seemed she could read his irises, read their plea. Do not ask me a question like that. Do not ask me in front of these men.
Discrete images presented themselves in Lily’s mind, like Polaroids shared at a garden party: Thelonious Monk on a music bench, a late-night street in Delaware, a billy club, a badge, knuckles so swollen they couldn’t bend into a fist. She’d never seen any actual photos, of course, but she’d heard the story. And maybe now what she was picturing was somehow accurate. Maybe her imagination was capable of calling up something she’d never seen but only ever thought about. Or maybe the images were all wrong. Maybe it wasn’t Thelonious Monk, but again her father. And maybe it wasn’t a swollen pair of knuckles but a baby swaddled in blue. Or maybe the face in the image didn’t belong to Monk or to her father; maybe it belonged to the trumpet player in London, the first man to steal her heart, though she’d known him for only a few hours. In London on her nineteenth birthday, unaccompanied by her parents, she’d gone to a club where she slow danced with a woman. Afterward, she smoked a marijuana cigarette and, her brain gloriously loose from the drug, she kissed a Negro trumpet player behind the stage. A burgundy velvet curtain had been the only boundary between privacy and publicity. Behind that curtain, the air thick and close with sweat and smoke, she’d let the trumpeter slip his hand beneath the waistline of her skirt. He started at the back, unzipping the garment only enough to allow his hand access, and then he moved it sideways and around—so slowly! such wonderful agony in his precision!—until his hand was on top of her little mound. He paused long enough only to be granted permission, then pushed aside the fabric and entered with a single finger. It was her first experience with actual ecstasy. To this day, she considered that solo and singular event—a secret from everyone but the musician himself—as the day she took possession of her body as a woman.
When Lily spoke again, it was not to the officers but to her bandage, which she now looked at but didn’t touch. “Piedmont, as he is called,” she said, “may stay here.”
“That’s not a good idea, ma’am.” It was the short one who offered this morsel of wisdom, and Lily couldn’t help wondering whether this was her earthly punishment: to be again and again contradicted and second-guessed by average and uninformed men.
“We have a guesthouse,” she said.
“Are there locks on the doors?” It was the one with the nose again. He sniffed the air suspiciously. “Locks on the windows?”
She ignored him and looked instead at Piedmont, her brows furrowed in a kind of unhinged and abrupt delight. “Are you strong?” she asked. “Can you help lift? I need to bring the upstairs down.”
“The upstairs down?” Piedmont asked.
“So to speak,” she said. “I’m moving. There are boxes. Could you help me?”
Piedmont nodded, though he seemed unsure.
She held out her hand again to the officer, who this time gave her the car keys. They were barely on the other side of the threshold when she closed and locked the front door, shutting out the so-called authorities and shutting in this stranger. She felt a stranger herself.
“I’m sorry,” Lily said—her first words alone with this Negro, with this Piedmont who was named for a park—“about the misunderstanding.”
She looked again at his hands. “But now tell me,” she said, “since we’re alone finally, do you play?”
Piedmont
“Where did you come from?” the woman asked, and Piedmont thought, What a question! Surely she didn’t mean from which block or which mother or which congregation or which homeroom . . . Piedmont wasn’t a fool. And yet these questions that the white folks asked seemed outlandish in their—what?—in their privilege? their straightforwardness? their unabashed directness? His own mother would have blushed in shame if she’d heard him be so blunt.
She didn’t wait for a reply, which was good since Piedmont still didn’t know how to answer. Instead, she moved away from him, turned around, and walked into a darkened room of the house and said, only as she was already leaving, “Follow me, please.”
He did as he was told, following her through at least two separate and unlit rooms before she came to a stop in what felt like the very back of the house. Here, she turned on a single overhead light, and he saw he was in a kitchen. A kitchen that, save for its size, wasn’t all that dissimilar from Carvie’s or his mother’s, which he hadn’t seen in more than a year.
She pulled out a chair. “Sit,” she said. “Please.”
He sat.
A clock in another room chimed five. It was the earliest he could ever remember being awake without first having gone to bed. He yawned. In his other life—the life he’d been living since leaving his mother’s apartment—he’d be home asleep by now.
Piedmont was startled by a cold hand on his forearm. It was the white lady’s. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“Dear lord,” she said. “Stop apologizing. You must be dead tired.”
He nodded.
“I’ll let you sleep,” she said, “but first you have to allow me to clean you up.”
He saw now that on the table in front of him was a small bowl of sudsy water. In the woman’s hand was a washcloth. She held it up. “May I?” she asked.
Never in Piedmont’s life, not once before this night, had he been touched by a white woman. He feared it might change him, as a human touch supposedly changed forever the smell of a baby bird, making the hatchling unknown to and undesired by its own mother. With deep discomfort, he watched the woman dunk the cloth into the bowl and wring it out. The drops, still white and clean for now, returned to the surface and disappeared.
His face burned where the soap made contact with his open wound. She wiped at his forehead. He could feel she was being gentle, trying to be gentle, but it made his stomach turn to imagine his skin being pulled and the blood running freely.
She dunked the cloth again, and this time when she twisted it, the water that returned to the bowl was pink and bubbly. He thought he might be sick. He closed his eyes. When he felt the sting against his lip, he turned away instinctively. With her free hand, she took hold of his chin. He didn’t wince again but neither did he open his eyes. He was scared to. He was scared to see her face so close to his.
Who he thought of at that moment surprised him. He should have been thinking of Miss Carvie, comparing that woman’s kindness to this one’s. He should maybe even have been thinking of his mother, whose touch he knew so well he would have known it in the dark, known it like the touch of his own hand against his face. But no, he wasn’t thinking of either of those women; he was thinking of Jeremy and Michael, thinking of them awake upstairs on the third floor of the funeral home, the window open wide, their arms stretched long outside to hide the smoke from their cigarettes. No doubt they’d have stayed up, the radio playing low, the lamp between their beds turned high, waiting for Piedmont’s return from work, wondering at his first deviation from routine since he’d gotten the job and gotten to know them.
Even before Jeremy and Michael, Piedmont had been aware of certain movements. He’d studied civil rights in high school. Of course, he’d dropped out by the time protesters marched down Broad Street in Albany, but he’d seen the photos in the paper. He’d once gotten his hands on a copy of the Southern Patriot that someone had left rolled up in a toilet stall in the men’s room at the Purple Pigeon. He’d unfurled it but hadn’t dared open its pages. The couple who published it had been arrested by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Piedmont didn’t know what, if any, the ramifications might be if he were caught with such a thing. Could possession alone get him arrested? Was it illegal or just frowned upon? So he’d furled the thing back up and left it where he’d found it, wedged between a toilet basin and the rear wall. Later that same night, he’d returned to mop the floors after closing and it was gone. Maybe it had been placed there deliberately, a surreptitious handing off, or maybe his boss had seen it and tossed it.
Whenever Michael and Jeremy talked about the meetings they attended, Piedmont would wonder about his own responsibility with regard to the Negro Cause. He wondered if it was okay to sit back, keep his head down, and wait for whatever improvements those around him might acquire on his behalf. He wondered if he even believed a better future was possible. He sometimes actively tried his hand at cynicism. But the truth was he dreamed often—not daydreamed, but nighttime dreamed—about a different type of life, not just for him, but for all Negroes. He sometimes woke up with his heart racing and his chest sticky with sweat to a feeling of urgency but also of futility. It was like trying for a word, feeling it on the tip of your tongue, nearly snatching it back from the corner of your mind where it had formerly been forgotten, and then realizing—suddenly, sadly—that you hadn’t lost it irretrievably, but that it was never there at all. The word you wanted so badly did not even exist. This was what Piedmont felt whenever he awoke from such a dream.
And so it was Jeremy and Michael and their burgeoning activism and also this vague fantasy of a different kind of life that Piedmont was thinking about as the white woman cleaned his wounds and the soapy warm water turned cold and dark with his blood. He thought about what Jeremy and Michael would say if they could see him now, his left eye swollen unevenly, his lower lip torn in two places. They wouldn’t be gentle with him as this woman was, as surely Miss Carvie would have been too. They would have been angered, outraged. Since the stonings and subsequent shootings at Delta Minor, their moods had changed. A week after the incident with the picketers, a Negro in California, thousands of miles away, had been murdered by white cops, and Michael had said—at the dinner table and in front of Miss Carvie, which was unlike him—that this was what the movement had been waiting for, an act so egregious, so outrageous, that the cause would surge with support, that even bystanders would turn indignant. “Our voices will be heard,” he said. He’d hit the table with such fury that a fork had been knocked to the floor. “If we have to pummel their ears with our fists, we will. If we don’t stop them now, they’ll only keep killing us. We’ll never be free if we don’t fight for our lives.” Piedmont had been moved when Michael said this. He felt the surge in his own bloodstream. But he was also frightened by the idea of action. He wasn’t sure that violence was the right response to violence. “My daddy taught me to fight,” he’d said to those school board members. He’d said it because he wanted to sound strong. He wanted to sound confident. He wanted them to think he could defend himself if necessary. But the truth was his daddy hadn’t taught him to fight—his mother wouldn’t have allowed it. Her preacher taught kindness and compassion. From childhood, he’d known always to turn the other cheek. And he thought of that phrase again when he heard Michael talking about the man in Los Angeles, but he also knew that the Bible was filled not with true anecdotes but with parables. And so when Michael talked and as he heard the phrase in his head, he didn’t see a cheek turning but a body. And to himself alone he wondered how many bodies could be turned, how many more Negroes could be killed, pushed to the side of the road, forgotten about, until perhaps violence was the only option. Maybe this was what they had come to. Maybe Michael was right. But Piedmont was still scared, and in his most honest moments, he was able to admit (but then only to himself) that the kind of change he hoped for—because he did hope for change—would come about for him, without his personal efforts, without risking his own skin.
