Gumbo: A Celebration of African American Writing Part 54

She had taken off my shirt. My fingers were now under her T-shirt, unfastening her bra. She pulled her arms through her sleeves, and I lifted her T-shirt over her head.

"Did you ever dream of me?" I asked her.

"Many times."

"And did you want to make love to me?"

"Many times."

I slid off the band that held up her hair and kissed her behind her ears.

"Even when I was married," she said, "I dreamed of you."

I cannot blame what followed on these words she said to me. I cannot say that because she mentioned her marriage, I was reminded of mine, and because I was reminded of mine, my body refused me. For the truth was I had not forgotten my marriage. I was the son of a long line of men who had had many wives, a man who had come to Christianity after he had pa.s.sed the age of myth. So Marguerite had often told me before.

So it must have been.

So it was that I felt no guilt when I kissed Marguerite, no guilt when I lay naked next to her. And so it had to be that when my body failed me, when it could not do what my heart, my soul, every fiber of my being desperately pleaded with it to do, I could not say it was because I was married, because Marguerite reminded me that I already had one wife.

"Did this ever happen to you before?"

I could hear the tremors in her voice.

I lay on top of her naked, impotent. "No," I said.

Tears gathered in the corners of her eyes. "It must be me. It must be me, then."

"No. No." I pulled her on top of me and hugged her. "It's not you. It's me."

"It's happened to me before," she said. "Harold . . ."

I put my finger to her lips. "It's not you. You are warm and beautiful and lovely."

"It happened with Harold," she said.

"I am not Harold."

"He said it was me."

"It's not you. How could it be you? Look at you. You're a sensual woman. Your skin is the color of the Sahara. Brown, warm, smooth. Not a blemish, not a mark. You smell like the desert. Like a flower in the desert."

"He said it was me," she repeated.

"Harold was a fool."

"He said I was hard to love."

"Harold was wrong."

"He said-"

"You are lovable, Marguerite. You are easy to love."

"Then why?"

"It happens to men, you know. More than we are willing to admit. I'm just nervous. Anxious. It's been too many years. Tomorrow," I said. "You'll see tomorrow. I'll be okay tomorrow."

I had told her the truth. I was anxious and nervous. But it had not happened to me before. Not in twenty-eight years of marriage to Nerida.

This was the fear every man lives with: the day he would lie on top of a beautiful woman and be betrayed by the body that had always served him. And yet I did not think that this was happening to me-the impotence men of my age feared. I knew that the stories we told of our wives' declining libidos were a camouflage to mask our anxieties, our fear of losing our own s.e.xuality, our potency. We sought rea.s.surance from each other. We wanted to convince each other that the end had not come. And I did not think the end had come for me that night. I knew that when my heart had stopped racing, that when with each touch of Marguerite's hand on my body my toes would stop tingling, my spine would stop quivering, I would have control of my body again.

"Let's sleep," I said. "It's too much for one day. After so long."

After so long. Not only with Marguerite, but also with Nerida. But I did not tell her that. That it had been six months since Nerida had let me in her bed. I was overexcited, overstimulated. My desire for her too intense, my mind racing too fast for my body.

Yet I knew that when my body failed me, it was not only because anxiety had reduced me to jelly, not only because I had waited so long, wanted her for so long. Remnants of a hard-learned reticence had returned to plague me. When I lay naked, stretched out on top of her, trying in vain to make love to her, it came back to warn me: This thing I had taught myself to shun. I remembered the pa.s.sion that took control of me with Mulenga, the pa.s.sion that had driven me into my room in the mission school, a prisoner of my fantasies. The pa.s.sion that drove me into my work when Marguerite ordered me to leave her apartment, the pa.s.sion that sometimes made me a stranger in my house.

The pa.s.sion that had cost my mother her life.

The pa.s.sion that made the man who loved her put a razor to his throat.

"You are beautiful," I whispered to Marguerite. "Desirable. Too desirable."

She curled into my arms. "Tomorrow," she said. She kissed the hair on my chest. "I love you," she whispered.

Her words would make me sleep until morning, would make me forget. They allowed me to sleep without dreams that would wake me in a sweat. I had her with me now, the curves of her body locked into mine like the pieces of a puzzle. We were whole again. I was safe. The pa.s.sion would not undo me.

In the morning I reached for her. The trembling under my skin had subsided, my blood ran warm again through my groin. We made love as we had before when we were young-with the same energy, the same intensity, the same pa.s.sion. I remembered she liked my tongue in her navel. She remembered I liked hers in my ears. I remembered she loved when I kissed her neck. She remembered I loved when she licked my chest. When the moment came, she stretched out taut beneath me and pushed me away, shouting the same words, "Get off. Get off." They had the same meaning. I braced myself and held on to her until the moan that had begun in the back of her throat rolled out to her lips, gathered force, and she screamed. Screamed with the pleasure of it. Begged me not to stop, not to let go. "Wait. Wait. Not yet. Not yet." And when I joined her, our voices became a symphony of the past restored.

Afterward, she lay on her side next to me. My hand traveled across the sand dunes of her body, the crest of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, the slope down to her waist, the incline up her hips. I kissed each inch I touched. I buried my face in the basin that cradled her navel.

"I like this," I said. "I like this valley. I could lose myself in this valley."

She kissed the top of my head and turned my face upward to hers.

"And I love this," she said. She covered my eyes with her mouth, first one eye, then the next, and she ran the tip of her tongue down the spread of my nose and across my lips. "And I love this."

No one had ever kissed me like that. Not Nerida. No one. No one had ever made me feel so worthy, so handsome. She said she loved my wide nose, my thick lips, my nappy hair, my blue-black skin. I had a cla.s.sical face, she said. Like a piece of African art.

"Tell me," I asked her, grateful, wanting to give something back, "tell me your secret. How do you stay so beautiful, so young?"

"I am beautiful and young because you think I am beautiful and young."

"No." I looked into her eyes. "I tell you this objectively. Without bias. A man would have to be blind not to see how young you look, how beautiful."

"I'm short," she said. "Short people seem younger than they are."

"I know short people your age. They don't look as young as you."

"Ah," she said, "you mean menopausal women. You mean women who can no longer have babies. Women whose wombs have dried up."

Discovered, I rubbed my chin across her hip to distract her.

"Ouch," she said. "That hurts."

"My stubble."

"I take a tiny little pink pill every morning." She would not let me off so easily from the slip I had made-Ibrahim Musima's theories that had penetrated my defenses even as I rejected them.

"A what?"

"To keep me young."

"A pill?"

"The elixir of life for the menopausal woman. It keeps us vibrant. HRT. Didn't you hear of it? Hormone replacement therapy. It gives us the estrogen we lose after menopause. It makes us young again, our b.r.e.a.s.t.s firm. It makes our skin glow. It's bad for us."

"Bad?"

"Yes, bad." She turned on her back. "Some say it can cause breast cancer."

"Then why do you take it?"

"Vanity."

"If it's bad for you, throw it away."

"You see this skin you like?" Her fingers brushed her cheek. "It would be dry without it."

"I don't love your skin. I love you."

"All men say that, but we women know it's the image you love."

"Marguerite!" But as my tone of voice admonished her, my heart sank. What else did she know, my Marguerite?

"You can't imagine how terrible a woman feels when she sees the disappointment in a man's eyes that will inevitably be there, later if not sooner. Then she knows for certain that she is not who he has fantasized her to be." Her eyes grew dark.

She was speaking about men in general, but still she frightened me. She had come too close to a truth I had lived. But there could be no comparison between her and my fantasy. She was infinitely more beautiful, her character immeasurably more admirable.

"We are not talking about men and women, Marguerite," I said, and pulled her to me. "We are talking about you and me, and I, Oufoula, say to you, Marguerite, that I love you, not your skin."

She closed her eyes. "Let me get old, Oufoula."

She said it as if begging for something I would willfully withhold from her and, perplexed by this sudden change, the pleading evident in her eyes when she reopened them, I responded quickly, "We will get old together, Marguerite."

But that was not the answer she was looking for. "I don't want to have to make myself young to please you," she said.

"You don't have to. I love you the way you are. Because of who you are." I brushed my lips across her forehead.

"And will you still love the real me when my skin is wrinkled?"

"Oh, Marguerite."

I was about to add more protestations, swearing my love for her, when she sighed and pushed herself away from me. "We play your game," she said. Her lips curved downward, sadly.

"Game?"

"We wear the makeup, the fancy clothes. We diet. We let doctors cut us up. I take HRT. But thee is always someone younger, firmer, that TV gives men to dream about."

"Marguerite." I pulled her back to me. "I have no interest in someone younger. It is you I love."

"And will you still want me when I am dried up like a prune?"

"I will love you forever." I held her tightly to my chest. "When you are old, when you are gray . . ."

"Grayer."

"When you've lost your teeth. Forever."

She laughed, but she repeated the word after me. "Forever," she said.

We both believed that was true.

An Orange Line Train to b.a.l.l.ston.

BY EDWARD P. JONES.

The first time Marvella "Velle" Watkins saw the man with the dreadlocks, rain threatened and she just managed to get herself and her three children down into the subway before it began. The rain was waiting for them at the end of their trip. On the crowded Stadium-Armory subway platform, she held Avis, the baby, by the hand, lest the girl wander off, and Marvin, the oldest, stood on his mother's other side. Marvin was looking into the tunnel out of which the train would come. He held his bookbag under one arm and looked down at the lights that were flush with the floor and whose blinking would indicate the approach of the train.

"How do the lights know when the train is comin'?" he asked his mother.

This was a new question. "I don't know," she said. "Avis, stop kicking like that." The girl continued to kick out at something imaginary in front of her and Marvella tugged at her arm until the girl stopped. "I guess," she said to Marvin, "that way down the line the moving train hits something on the tracks and that tells the lights ahead to start blinking."

Marvin seemed satisfied with the answer. He studied the lights and as he did they began to blink. The boy was nine. My son the engineer, his mother thought.

On the other side of Avis stood Marcus, her second son. Marvella noted out of the corner of her eye that he was yapping away, as usual, and at first Marvella thought he was talking to Avis or having another conversation with himself. "Everybody else is borin," he said to her the first time she asked why he talked to himself. He was now seven. Long before the train came into view, it sent ahead a roar, which always made Marvella look left and right to make certain her children were safe and close. And when she turned away from the coming train, she saw that Marcus had been talking to the man with the dreadlocks.

Marcus and Avis managed to find seats just in front of their mother, and she was surprised when the dreadlock man sat down beside her. Marvin found a seat on the aisle across from his siblings. Beside the boy was a woman as old as Marvella's mother, asleep, her head leaning against the window. For a few seconds Marvin looked at the old woman, then he opened his bookbag and took out a piece of paper.

The subway man running the train announced through the speakers in the ceiling that this was an orange line train to b.a.l.l.ston.

Marcus, after sitting for a few seconds or so, turned around and knelt in his seat, facing the man with the dreadlocks. Being so small, he hadn't been able to get a good look at the dreadlocks while he stood beside the man on the platform, but now he was closer and more or less head-to-head with the man and he planned to take advantage of the situation. I should tell him to turn around, his mother thought, but this might be one time when he's justified. Avis, a head or so shorter than Marcus, followed her brother's example and was staring at the man as well. A minute or so won't hurt, Marvella thought.