Wherever There Is Light (14 page)

“I love you,” Kendall said. It was the first time she'd told him that, and she rocked backward until he started to enter her.

“A Troj—”

“It's safe. My period's tomorrow.”

She let him in deeper. He stopped talking.

After a minute, she asked, “Do you love me?”

“You know I do.”

“I do?” She grinned, rocking forward so Julian wasn't inside her.

“I love you.”

She allowed him to slide into her again. “You like this?”

Julian nodded.

“This?” she asked, speeding up.

He didn't answer. The cords of his throat looked tight enough to snap.

“Do you?”

His eyes were slits.

“Should I stop?”

“Don't.”

“Do-o-o-on't?” she moaned, throwing her head back.

“Stop.”

“Stop?” She was moving faster.

“Ever.”

“Everrrrrrr?”

“Don't ever stop,” he said.

J
ulian had ordered a vanity table with a clamshell mirror for Kendall, and he loved to lie in bed and watch her there on the padded stool, brushing her hair while the light, coming through the windows, sparkled on the glass skyline of Shalimar, Chanel No. 5, and Lancôme Tendre Nuit. Below the perfume bottles, like the sprawl of a mythic, feminine metropolis, were cartons of Madame C. J. Walker's Vegetable Shampoo; white jars of Queen Helene cocoa butter; tiny bottles of clear and strawberry-colored nail polish; tubes of Max Factor lipstick; a shocking-pink, circular powder-puff box, three hairbrushes, and a big-toothed, wood-handled metal comb.

Now, on this Saturday, they had agreed to have dinner at the Tavern with Fiona and Eddie, and Kendall sat before the mirror in her bra, panties, and garter belt. Usually this sight entertained Julian to no end, but he was distracted by a flash of clarity: he would've preferred to stay home and keep Kendall to himself, a result of wanting her more than he'd ever wanted anyone. He loathed his desperation. Sure, he was thrilled that he'd finally found a woman to adore, but it made him feel like a ninety-pound weakling and filled him with dread for the day that Kendall would move to New York.

She said, “I'm not that pretty, you know.”

“Yes, you are.”

“Only because you can't see inside me.”

Julian wasn't sure what she meant. Perhaps it explained those walls she lived behind. The walls didn't bother him, but what might lie behind them made him nervous. “If you want to show me, I'll take a look.”

Kendall walked over to the bed and kissed him. “We'll be late.”

The Tavern featured first-rate food and formally dressed waiters who expected you to tip them enough to make doctors or lawyers out of their sons. On Saturday nights the line ran out through the vestibule and up Elizabeth Avenue, but Eddie and Fiona were already seated in a private corner, one of the privileges of being associated with Longy or Julian.

“You're famous,” Kendall said, as they veered between the tables and the diners glanced at them.

Julian was used to being looked at in Newark, but he suspected that the people were giving Kendall the once-over to figure out if she were a high-yellow bimbo or just a tan showgirl. Julian didn't care what people around town thought of her. Kendall could go anywhere in Newark and, if they knew she was with him, she'd be safe. New York was a whole other ball of wax. Julian was pals with some illustrious troublemakers and bent cops across the Hudson, but he couldn't protect Kendall there, and the city was rough on the ambitious. You could ask Mad Dog Coll or Dutch Schultz if they weren't deader than yesterday. Or Jean Harlow. Abe had fallen in love with her and helped make her a movie star, and by twenty-six the poor girl was on the unlucky side of the grass at Forest Lawn. Realistically, what kind of shot did any single girl have in New York? Especially a colored girl who thought she'd left Jim Crow in Florida. That was why Julian had offered to help Kendall rent an apartment. When she refused, he didn't want to insult her by mentioning it again. However, Fiona, who was on her second gin rickey, brought it up the instant Kendall sipped her pinot noir and started talking about her plans.

Fiona said, “You better get yourself some comfy shoes because you'll be walking awhile if you're gonna try'n rent from one of those hateful shitheels in Greenwich Village. Most of them'll get a gander at you and offer you a nickel to clean their toilets.”

Eddie took a slug of Jameson's. “Why don't ya mind your own business?”

“Edward doesn't like me to drink,” Fiona said. “He says it makes me too quiet.”

“Yeah,” Eddie said. “It works wonders.”

When Kendall first saw Fiona, with her ginger-colored hair pinned back from the elegant angles of her face, she hoped that she wasn't one of those prissy Irish bitches she'd known at school in Philadelphia. Then Kendall noticed the eerie, bluish-green fire in Fiona's eyes, and she concluded that whatever Fiona was thinking would, in short order, come out of her mouth—a crassness that Garland would've abhorred and that Kendall decided, on the spot, was an admirable quality.

“Toots,” Fiona said to her, “don't take any lip off a landlord. They're all Satan's spawn. If he gives ya any shit, tell 'im you're Black Irish and your old man walks a beat. If that don't work, send one of these lugs here to beat him senseless.”

Dinner was the Tavern classic: aged prime rib, baked potato, and string beans. As they ate, Fiona asked Kendall her opinion of Paul Henry.

“Who?” Eddie asked.

“The painter,” Fiona said. “Does landscapes of west Ireland.”

“Never heard of him,” Eddie said.

“I read about him in a book.”

Eddie said, “You're not supposed to be smarter than me.”

“Too late,” Fiona said. “Now let Kendall talk.”

Julian swelled up with pride as Kendall said, “Henry was influenced by Vincent van Gogh and his painting
Starry Night
. It was how he learned to capture landscapes and people as they were—stripped of the usual Irish romanticism.”

Despite his pride, the excitement in her voice saddened Julian, that she was so enchanted by a world he knew almost nothing about, and he despaired of ever catching up with her regardless of how many art books he read.

For dessert, they had coconut cream pie, which had achieved some nationwide fame because of the radio and newspapers. The pie was deemed so fundamental to the restaurant's success that the recipe was stored in a safety deposit box at the National Newark and Essex.

“Could either of you ladies learn to bake this?” Eddie asked.

Fiona and Kendall looked at each other.

Eddie said, “I hear the way to a man's heart is through his stomach.”

Fiona and Kendall began laughing and, nearly in unison, answered, “A little lower.”

Later, in bed, Julian reached for Kendall, and she gave him a fast hug and sat up, lighting a cigarette and dropping the match in the yellow, butterfly-shaped glass ashtray on the night table. She exhaled a curl of smoke. “Do you think I can be an artist?”

“Isn't it more important what you think?”

“Probably, but I want your opinion.”

“I'm not an art critic.”

“I'm not asking for a review.”

Julian held out his hand for the cigarette. She gave it to him. He took a drag. “I think you can be anything you want. And I—”

“You?”

Julian stubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray, and he heard the forlorn notes of a lost child in his voice when he said, “And I hope some of what you want is me.”

“Just hold me.”

“Not in the mood?”

She didn't answer and lay with her head on his shoulder and his arm around her. A few minutes later, Kendall said, “I'm going to start looking for a place on Monday.”

“Okay,” he said, and wanted it to be, but it wasn't, and he'd look back at this moment, this beat of fleeting time, and wonder if this was the night he began to lose her.

K
endall was grateful to Fiona for recommending that she wear comfortable shoes, because after two weeks in Greenwich Village she felt as if she were trying to rent in the whites-only section of Lovewood. At an apartment hotel on Grove Street, where a sign above the entrance claimed Suites/Apts Avail, she asked the goggle-eyed man at the desk in the lobby if he could show her a rental, and he said, “I can't. My foot hurts.”

“Will it be better soon?”

“Maybe in twenty, thirty years.”

And Fiona was right about the toilets. At a townhouse on West Fourth, where a studio in back off the garden had been listed for rent in the
Herald Tribune
, she rapped on the door with the brass knocker, and an old man in a black silk dressing gown came to greet her and exclaimed, “Bella, the new maid's here!”

Only one person demonstrated any kindness. When she inquired about an apartment above a candy store on Bleecker, the paunchy, middle-aged soda jerk replied, “I apologize, my sister just rented it.”

As Kendall started to leave, the soda jerk said, “Ya know the bandleader Noble Sissle?”

Hoping the fellow might have reconsidered, Kendall smiled at him. “I don't.”

“Noble got a singer looks like you. Lena Horne. A real doll.”

“You think Lena Horne knows where I can get an apartment?”

Before he could understand that there was more irony in her question than curiosity, Kendall was gone.

With minor variations, these scenes reoccurred day after disheartening day, and yet, after she rode the train back to Penn Station and Julian picked her up and asked, “How'd it go?” she always answered, “Didn't see anything worth a damn.”

In part, she lied because she knew he'd offer to solve her problem, which Kendall didn't want him to do. Her other motive for lying was less virtuous: Kendall resented the white people who rejected her, and she found herself, against her will, resenting Julian right along with them. Unfair, yes, but true, and she castigated herself for her ugly secret.

Her frustration didn't dampen her enthusiasm for the eccentric cosmos of the Village. A wispy man, bearded like Father Time, walking a quartet of calico cats on leashes down Perry Street and stopping people to ask for donations so he could finish composing the greatest history ever written—
An Oral History of the Universe
. In Washington Square Park, a group of short-haired white women in camisoles, dancing in a circle in the fountain while a Negro man watched from a bench, playing a guitar and singing the blues. In the Life Cafeteria on Sheridan Square, where Kendall regularly stopped for an egg-salad sandwich and carton of milk, she encountered bohemia in its full odoriferous flower: prostitutes, women and men, decked out for a party by lunchtime; assorted cranks and philosophers arguing; writers and painters scribbling in notebooks or drawing in sketchpads on their knees, all of them engaged in the hallowed task of translating their ephemeral misery into deathless art.

Now, late on this windy October afternoon, Kendall was hurrying along Seventh Avenue. She had just overheard two sailors at the cafeteria talking about rentals on Washington Square South. The door was answered by a heavyset guy with bear tracks of coffee stains decorating his undershirt. He looked Kendall up and down as if trying to determine whether she met some preconceived specifications.

“I'm Herm,” he said, leading her down the steps of the brownstone. “The building's been converted into apartments, so if the basement ain't to your liking, I got one on the third floor after New Year's. Rent for either's a hundred a month.”

That was fifty dollars less than Kendall had budgeted, and her heart almost leapt out of her chest. As a painter, she was concerned about the presence of natural light, but up a few stairs off the kitchen was a solarium that led to a walled, flagstone patio.