He was stunned to learn that she had long ago dismissed him. In fact, when he looked into her eyes, he knew he was remembering someone else, someone he had made up. Why, he had not known this woman at all! For the first time he detected a quality in Meridian that Lynne—who had know her only briefly—had insisted anyone could see. Meridian, no matter what she was saying to you, and no matter what you were saying to her, seemed to be thinking of something else, another conversation perhaps, an earlier one, that continued on a parallel track. Or of a future one that was running an identical course. This was always true.
There was also something dark, Truman thought, a shadow, that seemed to swing, like the pendulum of a clock, or like a blade, behind her open, candid eyes, that made one feel condemned. That made one think of the guillotine. That made one suspect she was unbalanced. When he noticed it he felt a shrinking, a retreating of his balls: He wanted her still, but would not have wanted (or been able) to make love to her.
And in front of this restlessness behind her eyes, this obvious mental activity, she placed a deceptive outer calm. He knew that in this woman who never seemed to hurry, and whom he was destined to pursue, the future might be short, but memory was very long.
He groaned. Mightily, and at length.
“Oh no,” Meridian said pleasantly. “You wanted a virgin, don’t you remember?” (He could remember nothing of the kind.) “You wanted a woman who was not ‘sexually promiscuous.’” (When had he said he wanted that?) “But on the other hand, you wanted a woman who had had worldly experiences ... to match your own. Now, since I already had a son, whose existence you frightened me into denying, and since you also wanted to make love to me, and since I had no worldly experience to speak of, marriage between us never reached the point of discussion. In Lynne you captured your ideal: a virgin who was eager for sex and well-to-do enough to have had ‘worldly experiences.’” She explained this in the voice of instruction.
What she said was absolutely true. Though he was positive he had never told her any of these things. He
had
wanted a virgin, had been raised to expect and
demand
a virgin; and never once had he questioned this. He had been as predatory as the other young men he ran with, as eager to seduce and devirginize as they. Where had he expected his virgin to come from? Heaven?
When he made love to Meridian it had been almost impossible to penetrate her; it was as if her vagina were sealed shut by a taut muscle that fought him. Afterward there was no blood and although she had not said she was a virgin, he had assumed it. It was only later that he could begin to understand why her vagina had been clenched so tightly against him. She had been spasmodic with fear. Fear because sex was always fraught with ugly consequences for her, and fear because if she did not make love with him she might love him, and if she did make love with him he might lose interest. As he must have seemed, to her, to have done.
But the truth was different. After they had made love, he learned she had been married and had had a child. How could he have a wife who already had a child? And that she had given that child away. What repugnance there arose in him for her. For her eyes which, he thought, burned unnaturally bright. For her thin body on which her breasts (which he much admired) hung much too heavily: When he knew about the child he thought of her breasts as used jugs. They had belonged to some other man.
He had wanted a woman perfect in all the eyes of the world, not a savage who bore her offspring and hid it.
And yet,
had she approached him on the street, dragging her child with her by the hand, he would never have glanced at her. For him she would not even have existed as a woman he might love.
Ironically, it was this awareness of his own limitation, which grew keener year by year, that caused Meridian to remain, a constant reproach, in his thoughts. Wherever he was he would think of her face, her body, the way her hands had fluttered over his back when she kissed him. He thought of the times she had seemed embarrassed for him and he did not know why. He thought of how frequently he had felt superior to her. There was one memory in particular that pained him: Years ago when he was dating the white exchange students she had asked him, the words blurted out in so thick a shame he knew she intended to forget she’d ever asked—“But what do you
see
in them?”
And he had replied cruelly, thoughtlessly, in a way designed to make her despise the confines of her own provincial mind:
“They read
The New York Times.”
Truman felt that that exchange, too, rested somewhere behind Meridian’s eyes. It would have been joy to him to forget her, as it would have been joy never to have been his former self. But running away from Lynne, at every opportunity, and existing a few days in Meridian’s presence, was the best that he could do.
T
HE SUMMER BEFORE
Meridian arrived in Chicokema, which was near the Georgia coast, Lynne visited her. They had not seen each other since the death of Lynne and Truman’s daughter, Camara, a year earlier. Meridian was living in an adequately furnished house that the black community—having witnessed one of her performances and the paralysis that followed it—provided. The house was in an obscure farming village on the Georgia-Alabama line, and how Lynne tracked her there Meridian was at first unable to imagine. The simple answer was that Truman, who was also visiting her at that time, and whose visits had become so commonplace she hardly noticed them, had apparently phoned her.
There were periods in Meridian’s life when it could not be perceived that she was ill. It was true that she’d lost so much of her hair that finally she had shaved her head and begun wearing a striped white and black railroad worker’s cap: the cotton was durable and light and the visor shaded her eyes from the sun. And it was also true that she was frail and sickly-looking. But among the impoverished, badly nourished black villagers—who attempted to thrive on a diet of salt meat and potatoes during the winter, and fresh vegetables without meat during the summer—she did not look out of place. In fact, she looked as if she belonged.
Like them, she could summon whatever energy a task that had to be performed required, and like them, this ability seemed to her something her ancestors had passed on from the days of slavery when there had been no such thing as a sick slave, only a “malingering” one. Like the luckless small farmers around her who tended their crops “around the weather”—sitting out the days of rain, rushing out to plant or chop or harvest when the sun came out—she lived “around” her illness. Like them, it seemed pointless to her to complain.
Meridian wondered who the stout white woman could be, knocking at her door as if her fist were made of iron. Then she saw that it was Lynne, a great deal changed.
“I’ll make us some tea,” she said, inviting her in.
“Thanks, Meridian,” said Lynne, unburdening herself of her satchel bag and flopping heavily onto the couch. “I’m exhausted!”
She wore a long Indian bedspread skirt—yellow, with brown and black elephants—and a loose black blouse embroidered with flowers and small mirrors around the neck. Intricately worked gold earrings dangled against her neck. Her olive complexion, which tanned golden in a day of sun, was now chalk-white, her eyes were red-veined and her eyelids drooped. Her dark hair was tangled and dull.
“I haven’t slept for three motherfuckin’
days,”
said Lynne.
“You should have stopped at one of those new Scottish Inns. They’re cheap.”
“Not cheap if you’re broke,” Lynne said flatly, looking about the room, her eyes resting for a moment on one of Meridian’s broadside poems which she had stapled to the wall. It was the last object of personal value Meridian owned, and she intended, when she vacated the house, to leave it there.
“Truman’s here, you know,” Meridian said, bringing in the tea. She had added bologna and light bread, the two foods people donated to help her upkeep wherever she went, and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Lynne began eating the bologna without the bread, which was white and spongy, rolled up like a wiener. Then she licked the jelly from the peanut butter, poking at it delicately but never missing, like a cat.
“I thought he might be,” she said, all attention focused on her food.
“Really, Lynne, there’s not the slightest thing between us. We’re as innocent as brother and sister.” Meridian stopped. Perhaps that was not as innocent as it might sound. “There’s nothing between us.”
“I know there’s nothing between you.” Lynne laughed, a short bark that ended in a cough. Her voice was hoarse from smoking and her top lip curled back in a way Meridian did not remember. “That’s why he flies to you like a goddamn homing pigeon. Nothing between you, my ass.” She had almost said “but my ass.”
“Lynne …”
“There’ll
always
be something between you.” Lynne laughed again, and pulled out a cigarette. “Maybe you
don’t
know what it is,” she said with some surprise, but with more undisguised cynicism. “What’s between you is everything that could have happened and didn’t, because you were both scared to death of each other. Black men and women
are
scared to death of each other, you know. Not your
average
black men and women, of course, who accept each other as only natural, but people like you and Truman who have to keep analyzing each other’s problems. People like you and Truman ought to lock yourselves in a room somewhere and smoke yourselves silly, fall into each other’s black arms and fuck your brains out.” She frowned. “Of course, you all do have that super-long line of failure in y’all’s personal relationships. That must be hard to go against. Or maybe it’s just too many blonde white women selling foot powder and Noxzema shaving cream. Did you know that Truman prefers blondes? I think he does....” She inhaled deeply and slowly let out the smoke.
“It must be deep,” she said after a pause. “He married me, and keeps trying to screw himself to death all over the place, and you—well, who knows what you do with yourself.... I don’t blame you though, for not getting married. That was real smart.
Real
smart. I wish somebody’d let me turn in my oaths. It was a shitty arrangement, after we had the kid.” She lifted her teacup and put it down without tasting.
“I’ve gained weight, haven’t I?” she asked.
“We’ve all gained,” said Meridian, “or lost.”
“Well, you sure haven’t gained,” said Lynne, glancing sharply at her, “in fact, you—”
“You just can’t see it,” said Meridian, deliberately cutting her off. She knew what she looked like; it didn’t bother her; but she did not wish to hear Lynne comment on it.
“And my hair is turning gray,” said Lynne. “I have gray strands all across the top. I started to dye it once. You know, it is so hard to live with myself, looking old so quick.” She reached up to touch the almost invisible strands of gray at her temples.
“You’ve had a hard life,” said Meridian.
“The only people who ever loved me,” Lynne continued absently, looking about for a mirror, “were the po’ folks down in the woods, the swamps. They never looked down on me. Never despised me. After I had Camara I brought her back down here one time to show her off and they loved us both. Didn’t despise us. Didn’t try to make us feel we had stolen one of y’all’s scarce few men. Made us feel like family. Of course they were the old type of black people, like that old religious lady who fed us that time. Remember her? They just came out on the porch and said: ‘Y’all
come
in. Here, girl, let me
see
this big old fine baby. What you name her? Camara. Now that’s
real
cute. Lord, ain’t she got a head of
hair.
And will you
look
at them big eyes. Just as
brown.
Naw, I think they’s
green.
Naw, I believe they
is
brown. Well, just come on to your kinfolk. Come on here. That’s right.’”
Lynne was beginning to weep. Tears slid off her chin.
“It looks more like it was bleached in the sun,” said Meridian.
“Never made us feel like there was nobody on earth so low as to want us. Me and my brown sugar baby. ‘Hair,’ she said, coming back, ‘looks like it was bleached in the sun’— my ass. Kind, polite, courteous—that’s that Southern charm folks down here have. It’s such shit.”
“Truman is out with his camera. He really should be back any minute.”
“With his camera! Probably taking pictures of all the poor little girls he’d like to fuck. That’s his only interest in the poor. Not to mention the black.” She wiped her eyes and lifted her cup in a salute.
“I forgot sugar,” said Meridian, rising and going into the kitchen.
“Mustn’t forget
sugar,”
said Lynne.
“Oy vey,
you’re a regular Betty Crocker. How do y’all do it, I wonder? Always gracious and calm. Perfect little ladies; whether you lived in the big house as Big Missy or as slave. It must’ve been all that corn bread. Made y’all mealy-mouthed.”
“I didn’t invite Truman,” said Meridian. “I never have.”
“I don’t care about Truman,” said Lynne, lighting up a reefer and taking a deep drag. “I don’t care about the son of a bitch any more.”
Meridian watched them meet in her back yard. They did not smile or touch. Truman was frowning, Lynne’s face was tense. Meridian stood in the center of the living room and began doing exercises. First she pretended she was slowly jumping rope, bouncing lightly off the floor and springing into the air. Then she touched her toes. Then she lay down and began raising first one leg and then the other, holding them suspended to the count of ten.
“What the fuck do you mean, nigger?” Lynne’s voice, harsh and wild, came from the back yard. It dropped into the quietness of the neighborhood like a stone.
“Will you shut the fuck up,
beast.”
“Not until you tell me why I can’t ever find you unless I look in Meridian’s back yard.”
“I don’t live with you. I don’t have to explain myself to you. Not any more, I don’t.”
“Look at me!” she said, foolishly, since he
was
looking at her. “You think you can step over me and just keep going ... ruin my life.”