The Coldest Night Page 6

  Their skin was greasy, his stung and boiled, and he was pulsing and breathing and his heart pumping blood. Turning inside him was something like greatness. It shivered down his arms and the whole of him was on fire. He set off inside her and he thought maybe that was the one and maybe with that they would be together forever.

  She returned herself to his side and closed her eyes and passed into something like sleep, but he was left raw and burned and awake. He thought how much he must be hated by her father and he hated him back. He had come along with her, both of them leaving their families behind. He did not know how bound she was to hers or even if she was bound to them at all. Sometimes he thought she’d found him so that he would take her away. That was fine with him.

  She whispered, “You opened my body and took out all my bones starting with the small ones.”

  She lay against him, the scant light rising on her neck, her body rigid.

  “Did it happen yet?” he asked, and was no more than a gasping whisper as his hand floated before his good eye and settled between her legs.

  “Oh, yes. I have a feeling,” she said. “I believe that was the one that made a new little baby.”

  “Do you think a boy or a girl?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. It has not decided yet. You know they take a little while to decide and even then they can change their minds.”

  The light was coming on and there were new shadow lines and he could make out streets canopied in trees.

  “This is the place?” he said, and he thought how greasy their skin in the warm sultry air, the darkness like velvet. He thought how far from home, from the stables, from the mountain, from the Gaylen horse.

  “Not yet,” she said, and told him they needed to wait a little bit longer and pick up a key.

  Chapter 11

  IN NEW ORLEANS THERE was a second-­floor apartment owned by an old woman, a relation of Mercy’s with whom she’d conspired to make her escape. They entered a courtyard and went down a cindered path. They entered again and waited in a high-­ceilinged foyer until the door cracked open. The caretaker, a gray-­haired woman, had glasses that magnified her eyes. When Mercy explained who they were, she smiled and let them in. She told them she was expecting them.

  Inside the paint was peeling and the plaster spalling. The floor was stained with watermarks and the carpets were mildewed and pitted with cigarette burns. When she returned with the keys, she told Mercy she’d cleaned and stocked the pantry and the icebox. The linens were fresh and if she needed anything, anything at all, just to come by and she would see to it. She handed Mercy an envelope that was addressed to her. Inside there was an affectionate letter from her aunt with a number of hundred-­dollar bills in the fold.

  The door to their apartment was painted red. Henry fitted the key in the lock and turned and pushed it open. The apartment they entered was painted gold with white wainscoting, the curtains violet, the scrims transparent. Upholstered in pale matching silks were two sofas, two armchairs, and four side chairs and a center table.

  Their rooms had tall palladium windows, storm shutters, and a balcony with a railing and there were flowerpots in the corners. In their upstairs rooms, the floor was covered with sweetgrass and there were sachets of honeysuckle in every drawer. The bedroom was a painted mural, bowers of full-­blown roses. There was a canopy bed, a bureau, and a highboy. There were votive candles in the cupboards to light, to keep them dry of mildew. All about the rooms were Chinese porcelains encircled with dragons, marble statues slim in head, throat, and feet. There were mirrors framed in flames or shell-­like curves, or wrapped in reeds and palms, a wall clock entwined in leafy melting branches. Where the sweetgrass separated, the floor was sticky to their feet and the soles of their shoes peeled with each step. The rooms were the spirit of a merely beautiful world: gilded, disfigured, and enchanted. They were softness and prettiness, the scene of their new existence. It smelled like brown sugar and they had a view of churches through the spreading.

  Over the days she applied a salve and Henry’s burns healed. In the closets were lace and antique clothes, satin high heels, bias-­cut slinks, a black and ivory satin halter gown, chiffon bedroom coats and jackets. Mercy tried them on one by one and sashayed about the rooms, her head held high. The clothes caressed the curves of her body and rippled when she walked and it was as if she were clothed in water.

  These fashion shows were the prelude to making love and at this they were very good. They would go until their hips were bruised and their bodies were thinned and dry and tasted salty. The room dark and hot and Mercy in a white slip and wearing lipstick, the sun setting down the east wall. He watched her as she sat on the tub wall and lifted her skirt to unclasp her stockings and slide them down her legs. Then she stood and, with her skirt still raised, slid her garter belt over her hips. At the sink she washed out her stockings and hung them over the shower curtain.

  “What did you do today?” she said.

  “I wandered about some.”

  “What did you see?”

  “I watched a dog eat a bee,” he said.

  With a pick he chipped ice and filled tall glasses with the shards. Mercy draped her arms over his shoulders. The scrims lifted in a brief wind and then settled as he quartered and divided again a lemon.

  “Let’s move on,” Henry whispered.

  “Where is better than here?” she asked, taking a step back.

  “Maybe Texas. Maybe California.”

  “But that’s so far from home,” she said.

  “But isn’t that what we’re doing? Running away?”

  “This love will take care of us.”

  When words were no longer enough, they took up where they left off with their lovemaking and they stayed in New Orleans because for her it seemed far enough from home. Those days in New Orleans were half bronze and half dream—to be in love and to be loved forever, and to be taken care of by that love.

  In the still hours of the morning, Mercy looked up from his shoulder and a scream caught in her throat. She pointed and he turned to see a man standing outside the window. The man was pointing at them and he was smiling. He wore the headgear of a jester and a multicolored suit festooned with white flickering lights. He was not standing on their balcony or propped to a ladder but was walking in the street.

  “Look,” she said, her fright turning to laughter. “There’s a clown outside the window.”

  She drew the sheet to cover her nakedness and Henry went to the opening in the wall where the lighted man stood. Outside was a man on stilts and there were dozens more and another man, smaller of stature, though who could know, and he was yelling at the stilt walkers through a megaphone trying to get them into some kind of order as if rehearsing for a parade. The stilt walker outside their window bowed contritely asking forgiveness. Henry nodded and the man smiled and stilt-­walked his way into line.

  That morning they came down from their rooms and entered into the Quarter. The air was thick and near to suffocating, so dense it was like a great stone inside his chest vying with his lungs for space. They entered a small chapel and there they were married and it became something they would do several more times for they found it to be a salutary experience.

  When they returned, they sat on the balcony and ate oranges and grapefruit. Tank wagons came through with water hoses, washing the streets and raising up the sour smell of liquor and urine left from the night before, and crews of black men followed the trucks, sweeping water and trash and smell before them. Shortly after they passed by their balcony, the air was clean and the sun shone a little brighter.

  “I think that’s a job I could do,” Henry said.

  “Don’t be silly,” she said.

  “Still,” he said, “I should ask.”

  “If you were to ask to do such a job, not only would they turn you away, they would be suspicious.”

  “But I ought to have a job.”

  “I don’t want you working,” Mercy said, and explained that when
he was away from her, her back would go to fire and her nerves would fray.

  “Besides,” she said, “of late, I have considered giving up the act of walking and if I decide to I would need you here to carry me from room to room.”

  “I’ll work at night while you sleep,” Henry said.

  “Then who will watch over me? I want my husband to stay with me.”

  “What about money?” Henry said.

  “We have plenty of money, enough for both of us for a long time.”

  “What happens when that runs out?”

  “I have enough relatives who hate my father and they will give us what we need.”

  ON MONDAYS THEY ate red beans and rice and in the afternoons they ate beignets and drank café au lait. There was a black man with blue cataracts who drew their portraits in charcoal for a dime. By day, the Quarter was alternately suffused with calmness and torrid heat, and the day was like a wetted rag with the scent of sugars and syrups, coffee and animal. In the evenings pastel shadows moved across the old brick, and slices of shadow appeared behind the wrought-­iron balconies, dapples of shadows on the cobbles in the street. Some nights there were soldiers in the street. They would get drunk and begin fighting and be hauled off to the riot pens. Mercy would light candles and they’d lie awake, listening to the guttering flames, aswim in the thick liquid air, the jazz music, the brawls in the streets.

  One evening they were passing through an alley when they saw a drunk man, narrow shouldered and buck toothed being questioned by a cop. It was the same man who’d drawn their portraits and Henry started to say something, but Mercy stopped him. The cop struck at the man’s hip pocket with a billy club to break the bottle he carried and whisky ran down the man’s pant leg. Again, Henry was to say something, but Mercy took his arm and urged him away. In that moment he understood how afraid she was of any encounter that might reveal them, her secrecy, her insistence upon locking the door.

  “The police. Stay away from them,” she said, and he knew enough to not ask why.

  Mercy began working on a book she was making and he would watch her gliding fingers as they scissored paper and taped and drew and painted. It was a large book with a hard black cover and sheets of thick paper and when she turned the pages they made great sweeping noises as if the paper still had memory of the wood it fell from. He listened to the scratch of her pencil and over her shoulder he could see drawings and paintings. There were faint letters, words, and numbers. She knew he was there and would let him look but not for so long before she would chase him away.

  He asked about one page and she told him she was writing a poem for every part of her body. On another page she said the image was nothing in particular but came from her mind and made little sense, but soon she would figure it out. The signs were as if a foreign language had been encoded by a nonspeaker, twice and thrice removed from understanding, and there were scribblings and washes and recipes, figures, fashion, algebraic calculations, and reminders of things to do.

  As the days passed Mercy began keeping more pages wholly unto herself and beyond his understanding. She would let Henry have glimpses and he would see a list of things to get at the market and be relieved but then another page without shape or form. She told him they were inside the book together and if she ever disappeared he would find her there, and then she shooed him away.

  Chapter 12

  ONE DAY HE WENT out and when he came back Mercy was weeping. She held a letter in one hand and an envelope in the other. It was a moment that bordered on the frightful because she had been eating pistachio nuts and her fingers and her mouth and about her mouth were red with stain and so too her eyes where she had wiped at them.

  “Why would someone say these things to me?” she begged to know, her red fingers fluttering in the air as she spoke.

  He looked at the envelope and there was no name and the letter itself was addressed to no one in particular. She told him she was working and happened to look down and saw where it had been slipped under the door.

  He asked what it said and she read.

  When I saw you, I knew I needed to tell you that I floated on that very same dinghy you’re on in that same vast ocean. I’ll tell you what I’ve learned firsthand about God. What he wants is to become more real to you than anything else in the world. His friendship will be like none you have ever known or will ever know again. He will talk to you just like a friend with skin would and your heart will know it is him talking. You will be astounded at the things he reveals about himself, others and about you. You will know it is his voice if it is full of love and encouragement, wisdom and humor. He does not speak King James English. The other angry condemning voices you hear are not his.

  “Who wrote it?” Henry asked.

  “The old woman with the glasses. I went to the balcony and saw her come out.”

  “She wants to save you.”

  “But I am not lost.”

  “No,” Henry said. “You are with me.”

  “Do you think she’s crazy?”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “Do you think she’ll do something?”

  “No.”

  “What about this?” Mercy said, waving the sheet of paper.

  Henry suggested she put the letter in one of her books and she seemed to brighten at the idea. She asked him to help her and he did, brushing glue onto a blank page, while she trimmed the edges of the letter and then damping its back with glue, together they pressed it down into the book, her hands overtop his. Then he held her and rocked her in his arms.

  “We are set in stone,” she said. “We are bound and forever will be.”

  That night they walked down by the river past the tall black iron fences, the black iron columnades and from off the river was the gentle invitation of evening wind.

  That morning Henry saw a woman jump into the river and disappear. She put her purse down near the levee and walked out on the rocks and jumped in. She then swam toward the middle of the river and disappeared in the fog. Birds were skimming the mystic dazzling surface and Henry watched her as she disappeared into the milky light. There was a man by the river and he observed to him what had just happened.

  “Oh,” the man had said, “she seems to be a real good swimmer.”

  “Where is she swimming to?” he’d asked.

  “One time she made it to the other side, but the current took her several blocks downstream.”

  “But she has disappeared,” Henry said.

  “Maybe you should tell someone, but I’ve seen her do it before. She’s a real good swimmer. I can’t say, but it seemed like her own idea and you’ve got to ’spect that.”

  As they approached the place there was a gathering of people where the woman had entered the water and farther out a trolling boat.

  “She’s drowned,” Mercy said.

  “I am afraid of that,” he said.

  “We can’t do anything about it,” she said. “We should but we can’t.” Her words were her thoughts tumbling from her mind.

  Henry took her in his arms, but she pulled free and stood alone. He took her again and held her tightly and when she softened and breathed into his chest he guided her away from the river.

  Their days remained as such, released into the hush of indeterminate time, the world poised at the strange edge. There was no clock, no calendar that moored them in the stream of nights that begot days and days that drifted into darkness. It was as if they’d broken time itself and there was only waiting. Waiting for light and darkness, waiting for sunrise and sunset.

  Then came the day he convinced her to let him work and send money to Clemmie, because he’d always contributed a share to their existence. Mercy had of late been restless and changeable, plunging into long meditative silences and then for no perceptible reason engaging him again.

  “I understand,” she said. “If you must.”

  So he took work cleaning an office building just completed and being readied for the occupants. His partner w
as a Haitian named Paul, a black-­skinned man, not tall, but ebullient and, as he did not speak English, made for good company.

  When Henry came back after work that first day, Mercy was in bed, crying. She told him that she was having bad thoughts and had decided against any future absence on his part.

  “I’m afraid,” she said.

  “Of what?” he asked, taking her feet in his hands and holding them to his chest.

  “That one day you won’t come back.” She curled her toes to clutch at his fingers and then released her hold.

  “But you know I will,” he said.

  “I am afraid they will steal me while you are gone. Don’t you see? He will steal me and lock me up.”

  “No,” he said, moving to take her in his arms. “Nobody steals anybody. I will protect you.”

  “It’s what he did to my mother.”

  He held her tightly in his arms and she let herself be comforted. He told her how much he loved her back and she told him how very much her back was in love with him.

  “I have never been loved by a woman’s back,” he said.

  “My back has changed since we have been together,” she told him into his chest, and after a time they fell to sleep.

  As each of the next few days went by she seemed less and less afraid at his morning departures. At work, he could not convince Paul it was okay to break at midmorning and take another break at noon for lunch, so he’d go down the stairs alone to the park across the street and wouldn’t even be hungry but would sit in the sunlight and watch Paul in the empty windows across the street.

  Paul’s whole body would be framed in the big windows as he wetted the glass and stretched out his arms with rags in both hands and washed the windows and it would be as if he were washing the air itself as his hands swam before him. Henry would think of Mercy and wonder what he’d find when he climbed the stairs. She could rock back and forth for hours staring off to nowhere for long periods of time. He wondered sometimes if she’d even be there, or maybe she would be stolen away as she feared. And he missed Clemmie and felt a growing shame for leaving her.