Wherever There Is Light (13 page)

Neither of them questioned the change just then, nor afterward, under the steaming spray in the tiled shower stall, while Julian rubbed Kendall with a washcloth and determined, somewhere in midscrub, that her breasts needed some attention from his mouth. With her breath quickening, Kendall lathered up Julian with a bar of Palmolive, and when they finished, both of them were panting and the hot water was gone.

Temporarily satisfied, they got dressed and strolled through Meadowland Park behind the apartment house, past swans gliding across the lake, and stopped at the public library, where Julian checked out a copy of Hemingway's
To Have and Have Not
, and Kendall was delighted to find
Taos Pueblo
, a collection of photographs by Ansel Adams. Julian carried the books under his arm and held Kendall's hand as they walked by the shops on South Orange Avenue. No one gaped at them, Kendall observed, though she didn't see any Negroes other than a handful of women in maid's uniforms coming out of the grocery store or wheeling baby carriages.

“Ready to try Russian dressing?” Julian said, and opened the door of Town Hall Deli.

“If they put it on food. I'm starving.”

There were no tables in the deli, just butcher-block counters and glass cases of meat, fish, and salads, and the air smelled of pickles soaking in barrels of brine. At the register, Julian paid and was presented with his order in a cardboard box, the New Jersey version of a sloppy Joe—a triple-decker sandwich on thinly sliced rye, cut into eight sections, with roast beef, pastrami, Swiss cheese, coleslaw, and Russian dressing.

They ate on the couch in Julian's living room with its sweeping views of the park and listened to Billie Holiday on the big console RCA radio. Evidently, Kendall liked the Russian because she finished two sections of the sloppy Joe before taking a sip of her beer and two more before the music gave way to Edward R. Murrow reporting the news:

“
This
—is London,” Murrow announced in the dry, flat tone of the American West. “And from here I can tell you that Herr Hitler's blitzkrieg is scorching the Polish countryside. The dead compete for space in grain fields and woodlands. The
New York Times
reports that Nazi military leaders are currently devising plans to relocate Poland's three million Jews . . .”

Julian got up and turned off the radio, then sat in one of the burgundy club chairs across from the couch. Kendall went to sit on his lap.

Julian said, “It's odd thinking that being Jewish should be worth a story on the news.”

“Like being colored down South. One wrong move, you're a headline in the Negro papers. You think we'll get into the war over there?”

“Roosevelt says no.”

“What do you say?”

Julian tightened his arms around her. “That I'm glad you're here.”

K
endall had intended to stay with Julian for a few days before beginning her search for a rental in Greenwich Village. Yet as the weeks went by and leafy canopies of red, orange, purple, and gold cast shadows across the streets, the New York newspapers she'd bought remained on the coffee table, along with her art and photography magazines and the course catalog from the Art Students League.

Her life with Julian took on the rhythm of a honeymoon. They borrowed books from the library and walked to the Cameo Theatre to see
The Wizard of Oz
. They ate double-dip ice-cream cones from Gruning's and took long walks through South Orange and into Maplewood, the next town over, until the gas lamps came on, and the smell of burning leaves permeated the tumbling darkness. They cooked together: Kendall taught him her grandfather's art of frying chicken, from the buttermilk soak to the batter mixed with cayenne pepper, paprika, and molasses, and Julian impressed her with his beef stew—his secret ingredient, generous pourings of cabernet sauvignon.

During these weeks the closest Kendall got to Greenwich Village was when she and Julian drove through Manhattan to the World's Fair in Queens. Flushing Meadows was mobbed, all those people crushed by today eager for a glimpse of tomorrow. They wandered through the planetarium and the RCA pavilion; they watched swimmers frolic like balletic porpoises in the Aquacade, inspected the paintings in the Masterpieces of Art exhibit, and drank champagne at Le Restaurant Français.

Kendall said, “I saw the Baedeker's guide to Paris on your bookshelf.”

“So when we go I can show you around.”

“You'd go with me to Paris?”

“Say the word.”

“Why?”

“I—I love you.”

He had whispered this to her in bed, but you couldn't count what a man said when his clothes were on the floor. Kendall reached across the table and toyed with his fingers, and she felt wonderful until they went to see the Westinghouse Time Capsule, a copper tube that would be opened in five thousand years and had been stocked with hundreds of items—from a tobacco pouch to a safety pin—that would give future generations a taste of the 1930s. As Kendall considered the exhibit, her mother popped into her head, denouncing her talk about becoming an artist as an excuse to loaf around and reminding her that no daughter of Garland Wakefield was brought up to be a hootchie-cootchie girl for some white man. Kendall had written her mother once, saying that she'd forward an address and phone number when she got settled, and in the event of emergency she should contact Julian. Kendall could imagine the steam shooting out of Garland's ears when she read that information. But what gnawed at Kendall was that she agreed with her mother, and Garland's critique, combined with too much champagne and the pencil-thin white lady who was glowering at them, soured her mood.

“We should climb into the capsule,” Kendall said. “And when they dig us up maybe it'll be normal for whites and Negroes to traipse around holding hands.”

The spiky edges were plain in her voice, and in the car, with that same tone, she said, “You know that you and my mother are the only ones who don't call me Kenni-Ann?”

“Why doesn't your mother?”

“Because she's always mad at me.”

“I'm not mad at you,” Julian said, believing that Kendall was just blowing off steam because of the nasty look that old dame had given them.

“So why don't you?” she asked.

“Kenni-Ann's too cute.”

“I'm not cute?”

“You're too beautiful to be cute.”

From her sullen expression Julian could see that the compliment hadn't mollified her, but fortunately it did bring their conversation to a close—at least until they entered the lobby of his apartment house, and she said, “That time capsule was pure arrogance. Who'll care about us in fifty centuries?”

In an effort to dodge an emotional slugfest, Julian gave her the keys. “I'm going to Gruning's to get some dessert. I'll meet you upstairs.”

When Julian returned with a quart of ice cream, Kendall was on the sofa with her legs drawn up under her skirt and the twilight coming through the windows cocooning her in a violet glow. As Julian dropped his hat and coat on a chair, he saw something beyond the melancholy that occasionally seeped into Kendall's eyes—he saw an unbridgeable separateness, a confinement behind invisible walls that Kendall herself had built. Perhaps it was an unavoidable consequence of being a smart, talented Negro in a society that expected you to scrape and bow, or of being a woman whose supreme goal wasn't a husband, or of her yearning, over the objections of her mother, to be an artist.

Julian respected her self-containment: it was a quality he valued in himself. All the same, as he sat on the couch and Kendall smiled ruefully at him through a lilac cloud of light, he had to admit that those walls around her were frighteningly high and he might not be able to scale them. He was willing to risk it, though, believing that if he cherished her enough, opened himself up enough, if he just flat out loved her enough, they wouldn't end up like the couple on the cover of the avant-garde art journal Kendall had left on his coffee table—a woodcut done by some dotty Norwegian artist whose name was Much or Muck. In the picture, a young woman with flowing hair stood on a beach, facing away from a man standing behind her and staring at the moon above the water. They were several steps apart, but the feeling of the distance between them was so profound that they might as well have been on different planets.

Kendall said, “I thought you weren't coming back.”

Her eyes were puffy from crying.

“Where would I go?”

“I don't know. . . . I shouldn't have barked at you.”

Julian hugged her, and Kendall trembled against him. “I'm sorry. I hate when I bark like that. I sound like my mother.”

“Only younger,” Julian said, and laughed.

Kendall laughed too. “Am I really going to wind up like her?”

“Not if you don't want to.” Julian let her go. “Feeling better?”

She grinned. “Depends on the flavor ice cream you bought.”

“Your favorite.” Julian reached over to the oblong glass coffee table and removed the carton from the bag. “Butter pecan.”

Kendall used her forefinger to sample the ice cream, then pushed Julian back, kissing him deeply, taking off his tie, unbuttoning his shirt, and rubbing him, his stomach as flat and smooth as ivory and the hardness under the flannel of his trousers giving her ideas, none of which, she was certain, her mother would approve of.

Julian's hand crept under her sweater, and she pulled away, sitting astride him, dipping two fingers into the butter pecan and slathering his nipples with ice cream.

He shivered.

Kendall asked, “You think what's good for the goose is good for the gander?”

Julian smiled to indicate that he was interested in finding out, and as Kendall cleaned off the butter pecan by nibbling at him with her lips, they determined that the cliché contained more than a grain of truth. Julian would've been content to continue their inquiry, but Kendall sat up, tugged off her sweater, and undid her bra.

“These?” she said.

“Those.” As fond as Julian was of the high, round firmness of her breasts, it was the creaminess of her skin that left him breathless, and her coloring, as though someone had mixed honey and cinnamon and sunlight in a jar.

“You sure?” she asked.

Julian lifted his head toward her, but she was gone, kneeling on the floor and ridding him of his loafers, socks, trousers, and boxers, then coating his cock with butter pecan, the ice cream melted now and as slick as oil. Julian felt her tongue licking him, circling him, and then her mouth covering him, up and down, tentatively at first, her movements accelerating until all Julian was aware of was the rising and falling of his hips.

Kendall hadn't done this before. For the last several days, she'd wanted to try it yet was scared that she'd choke to death, which, she told herself, wouldn't lead to the most flattering obituary. Now, with her mouth bobbing on Julian, a peacefulness flooded through her, and she reveled at arriving in this place beyond the clutches of self-doubt. Pausing for an instant, she admired the divine agony on Julian's face and felt so pleased by her sense of power and the tingling between her legs. It was a revelation to her, this getting by giving. Necking and petting had always felt to Kendall as though she were guarding a prize that boys were attempting to steal from her. Even with her serious college romances—first Simon, then Derrick—all she'd received in the exchange was a pleasant tepidness instead of the devouring heat she'd expected, and stroking them until her hand was sticky was a relief, because—for that evening—they stopped trying to coax her into surrendering a gift she preferred not to give them.

Kendall was disappointed by her response to these encounters. Sometimes she believed that her desire to live in Paris had less to do with art than with her wish to shuck off the straitjacket her upbringing had fashioned for her, as if by breathing the voluptuous air of that sublime city, scented as it was with the sexual mists of centuries, she might become as daring as the most ambitious coquette at the court of Louis XV, a seductress out of the paintings of François Boucher, lush and wanton, a stranger to shame.

Julian was groaning louder, and Kendall wondered why her erotic metamorphosis had occurred with a white, Jewish ex-bootlegger who'd grown up in Germany. She loved looking at Julian: his broad shoulders, wavy hair, and cleft chin; his smile that was two parts irony and one part joy; and his blue eyes that seemed to change color, like the ocean depending on the height of the sun. He was curious and listened to her as if she were the one person on earth with something to say, and he knew his business in bed. Yet none of this explained why her pleasure with him possessed the intensity of a glorious tantrum. She liked that he could protect her, that he hadn't thought twice about manhandling Hurleigh Scales, and he'd probably been responsible for somebody's burning down the garage apartment where the mayor's brother lived. Ever since meeting him, she had envied his independence and contempt for rules, and wished that those two qualities would rub off on her. Both mattered to her, though ultimately, Kendall decided, as she stood up and Julian watched her unhook her skirt, unsnap her garters, then peel off her stockings and panties, her reason for letting herself go with Julian was that she trusted him. Positioning herself above Julian on her hands and knees, Kendall let her breasts brush his face, and he went at them like an infant with an unquenchable thirst. She murmured a string of nonsensical syllables, thinking that she trusted Julian because of her perception that, like her, he viewed himself as flawed in an unfixable way, a flaw that marked him as a permanent outsider, lonely beyond redemption. They were kindred spirits. In his arms, her loneliness was finally assuaged; she never heard Garland's harangues; and it was Kendall's fear of feeling so hopelessly alone again, with just her mother's razor-sharp voice for company, that had kept her in South Orange longer than she'd planned.