What did I want from Vernor Matheius!

I pondered this. I may have smiled, slightly. A girl in a black silk dress with a neckline that exposed her pale smooth chest, a white-skinned girl being spoken to, lectured to, earnestly by a sharp-faced black man in a gray jacket, silk vest, greasy dark necktie. I hoped to sound like a girl practiced in sexual wiles, seduction. In the eyes of those diners covertly watching us, a mysterious girl. "Only to be with you, Vernor. If-" He squeezed my fingers harder, as if he felt pity for me, and impatience. As if wielding a piece of chalk, working out a syllogism on a blackboard in Introduction to Logic. "Anellia, there is not the opportunity for that." He might have been making a statement about weather; a self-evident fact; a fact not to be questioned; a fact not to be modified; he chose his words, as usual, as if each word had a price; he was parsimonious with words, and shrewd. Sipping the last of the wine, the dark red liquid he hadn't offered to me to taste. My mouth ached with its unaccustomed smiling; a public display of smiling; a roaring in my ears like the sound of the surf in a dream imperfectly recalled; I could not hear the rest of Vernor's words; Vernor's dark fisted hand enclosed mine as if protectively, lifting so that his knuckles lightly grazed my left breast; the shock of being touched ran through me; I felt my nipples harden, absurd and piteous inside the black silk dress of a dead woman; it was a caress meant to comfort, not to arouse; nor even intimidate; there was nothing sexual in the gesture except in the display of it, and perhaps that display was unconscious; still I felt strangers' eyes upon us, cold and infuriated; I hadn't the strength to confront them, and drew back from Vernor's casual touch. I thought This is a life: these minute particles of sensation, emotion. I thought But can I live this life? Am I strong enough? Our waiter had departed, and had not approached our table for a long time; he'd prepared the check, and placed it conspicuously near Vernor's elbow; now the maître d' in his tuxedo stood above us imperial and frowning; disapproving; explaining in a tone of perfunctory apology that our table had been reserved for another party at nine; it was now past nine; we would have to leave as quickly as possible; the check could be paid at the front. Vernor lifted his eyes widened in mock solicitude to the maître d', a white man in his fifties with an oblong fattish face, insolent eyes; Vernor seemed about to protest, then said nothing, and with deliberation pushed back his chair and stood, abruptly; in such a way that the maître d' stepped back; not that Vernor had threatened him; a tall knifeblade of a man with very dark, chiseled face and fisted hands. I'd gotten quickly to my feet, wanting only to escape from this terrible place; for the restaurant was air-conditioned, and uncomfortably cool; it was a temperature for men in suits, not for girls in low-cut silk dresses; I'd been shivering through most of the meal. Vernor took my hand and tugged at me, saying to the maître d' in a tone of icy politeness, "Fine. We are leaving, and you needn't worry we'll be back."

And there we are walking through the Brass Rail as diners stare at us wondering was there a confrontation? between the maître d' and that arrogant black man? I try to see us: but there's a blur, a merciful haze; as in a dissolving dream; the gray silk vest, the black silk dress; a face frozen in anger, a face stricken in embarrassment. Can I live this life, am I strong enough? I waited outside the Brass Rail as Vernor Matheius settled the bill.

And later. In Vernor's bed in those sheets smelling of our bodies; in Vernor's arms that didn't close about me, but held me loosely rocking as one might comfort a small child; I was trying not to cry for nothing's so banal as crying in a lover's arms, banal and futile; as Vernor said, with unnatural gentleness, "Didn't I warn you, girl, I'm not a man for any woman to count on? Eh?" and, more gently, "I wish I could love you the way you deserve, a girl like you, but I can't, you know I can't, I have never lied or misled you, Anellia, have I?" These earnest words like a pronouncement of death and yet I was pleading, "Vernor, I can I-love enough for us both. Give me a chance!" My absurd makeup had begun to melt on my sallow little face. My hair I'd shampooed that afternoon, brushed to a sheen, now disheveled as if I'd been wakened from sleep. And Vernor saying in that soft resolute voice, "Anellia, maybe you should go away now. Maybe this should end." I held myself very still, very still, not hearing.

To purify myself utterly, how? To become nothing, bare picked white bones. And then I will be free.

29

On June 12, 1963, three days after our evening at the Brass Rail, a young NAACP field secretary named Medgar Evers entered history; he was shot in the back by a white racist as he was about to enter his home in Jackson, Mississippi. Even Vernor Matheius who avoided the news like a bad smell could not avoid learning of this.

Fuck. Fuckers.

It was a sign of Vernor's debasement, that so common, you could say so clichéd a vulgarity sprang to his lips.

Beginning now to drink in the early afternoon. At midday. Waking late, groggy and still drunk from the night before; dragging himself to work at his desk, or try to work; beer, rot-gut wine, cheap jug wine; refused to leave his apartment, even to wash, put on fresh clothes. He was feverish, he had no appetite. Now the raw sewage was backing up on him. Stay away he warned me but I would not. I took advantage of his illness, his weakness; every day, twice daily, I climbed the outside stairs at the rear of Vernor Matheius's building where the door might be locked against me and no amount of pleading could induce Vernor to open it, or the door might be unlocked, might swing open when I pushed against it and an odor of defeat and fury would fill my nostrils so that my instinct was to flee even as, stubbornly, I would not. Why! Why d' you come here when I don't want you was Vernor's silent accusation. As I pleaded, in silence taking his hand and lifting it, the sweaty unwashed palm, to my cheek. I've told you: I can love enough for us both.

Through that long winter and into the spring there'd been a flu epidemic in upstate New York. Vernor had boasted of being immune to such weakness, but at last he succumbed; joking that he'd been poisoned at the Brass Rail. Within a week he'd lost so much weight I could see his breastbone sharp as the edge of a shovel outlined through his filthy shirt when he lay flat on his back; I saw that his cheekbones had grown sharper, his eyes were sunken and glowed meanly as the candlelit eyes of a deranged Hallowe'en pumpkin. I was frightened for him. I worried he would starve himself to death out of spite like those recluses we'd hear of sometimes in the countryside of my childhood, who hadn't enough to eat during the winter or were too poor or too proud or too stubborn or too deranged to ask neighbors for help. Of the martyred Medgar Evers whose assassin had not yet been named Vernor said That's what happens when you step into history: history grinds you flat beneath its boot heel. The remark seemed to give him pleasure.

There were times when he seemed delirious; there were times when he ranted, cursed; once when I let myself in, with a key I'd appropriated from him, I was shocked to see that he'd thrown books and papers onto the floor in disgust, he'd torn down the likenesses of Socrates and Descartes; in the smelly little bathroom, it looked as if he'd urinated onto the likeness of Wittgenstein with his enigmatic bamboo cane. Trying to lower his window shades he'd dislodged them from their rollers and they dangled in strips and shreds I could not repair, and so I removed them; there was broken glass underfoot, there were cigarette butts, ashes; the room stank of beer and cheap jug wine and of smoke and of scorched fabric; there were scattered burn marks in the bedclothes; I worried that Vernor would set fire to his bed, burn himself and his fellow tenants in the night.