In Love and Trouble (2 page)

“What is it?” I asked, not caring in the least.

And that is how we drove up to the house. Four bedrooms and two toilets and a half.

“Isn’t it a beauty?” he said, not touching me, but urging me out of the car with the phony enthusiasm of his voice.

“Yes,” I said. It is “a beauty.” Like new Southern houses everywhere. The bricks resemble cubes of raw meat; the roof presses down, a field hat made of iron. The windows are narrow, beady eyes; the aluminum glints. The yard is a long undressed wound, the few trees as bereft of foliage as hairpins stuck in a mud cake.

“Yes,” I say, “it sure is a beauty.” He beams, in his chill and reassured way. I am startled that he doesn’t still wear some kind of military uniform. But no. He came home from Korea a hero, and a glutton for sweet smells.

“Here we can forget the past,” he says.

page 120

We have moved in and bought new furniture. The place reeks of newness, the green walls turn me bilious. He stands behind me, his hands touching the edges of my hair. I pick up my hairbrush and brush his hands away. I have sweetened my body to such an extent that even he (especially he) may no longer touch it.

I do not want to forget the past; but I say “Yes,” like a parrot. “We can forget the past here.”

The past of course is Mordecai Rich, the man who, Ruel claims, caused my breakdown. The past is the night I tried to murder Ruel with one of his chain saws.

MAY, 1958

page 2

Mordecai Rich

Mordecai does not believe Ruel Johnson is my husband. “
That
old man,” he says, in a mocking, cruel way.

“Ruel is not old,” I say. “Looking old is just his way.” Just as, I thought, looking young is your way, although you’re probably not much younger than Ruel.

Maybe it is just that Mordecai is a vagabond, scribbling down impressions of the South, from no solid place, going to none … and Ruel has never left Hancock County, except once, when he gallantly went off to war. He claims travel broadened him, especially his two months of European leave. He married me because although my skin is brown he thinks I look like a Frenchwoman. Sometimes he tells me I look Oriental: Korean or Japanese. I console myself with this thought: My family tends to darken and darken as we get older. One day he may wake up in bed with a complete stranger.

“He works in the store,” I say. “He also raises a hundred acres of peanuts.” Which is surely success.

“That many,” muses Mordecai.

It is not pride that makes me tell him what my husband does, is. It is a way I can tell him about myself.

page 4

Today Mordecai is back. He tells a funny/sad story about a man in town who could not move his wife. “He huffed and puffed,” laughed Mordecai, “to no avail.” Then one night as he was sneaking up to her bedroom he heard joyous cries. Rushing in he found his wife in the arms of another woman! The wife calmly dressed and began to pack her bags. The husband begged and pleaded. “Anything you want,” he promised. “What
do
you want?” he pleaded. The wife began to chuckle and, laughing, left the house with her friend.

Now the husband gets drunk every day and wants an ordinance passed. He cannot say what the ordinance will be against, but that is what he buttonholes people to say: “I want a goddam ordinance passed!” People who know the story make jokes about him. They pity him and give him enough money to keep him drunk.

page 5

I think Mordecai Rich has about as much heart as a dirt-eating toad. Even when he makes me laugh I know that nobody ought to look on other people’s confusion with that cold an eye.

“But that’s what I am,” he says, flipping through the pages of his scribble pad. “A cold eye. An eye looking for Beauty. An eye looking for Truth.”

“Why don’t you look for other things?” I want to know. “Like neither Truth nor Beauty, but places in people’s lives where things have just slipped a good bit off the track.”

“That’s too vague,” said Mordecai, frowning.

“So is Truth,” I said. “Not to mention Beauty.”

page 10

Ruel wants to know why “the skinny black tramp”—as he calls Mordecai—keeps hanging around. I made the mistake of telling him Mordecai is thinking of using our house as the setting for one of his Southern country stories.

“Mordecai is from the North,” I said. “He never saw a wooden house with a toilet in the yard.”

“Well maybe he better go back where he from,” said Ruel, “and shit the way he’s used to.”

It’s Ruel’s pride that is hurt. He’s ashamed of this house that seems perfectly adequate to me. One day we’ll have a new house, he says, of brick, with a Japanese bath. How should I know why?

page 11

When I told Mordecai what Ruel said he smiled in that snake-eyed way he has and said, “Do
you
mind me hanging around?”

I didn’t know what to say. I stammered something. Not because of his question but because he put his hand point-blank on my left nipple. He settled his other hand deep in my hair.

“I am married more thoroughly than a young boy like you could guess,” I told him. But I don’t expect that to stop him. Especially since the day he found out I wanted to be a writer myself.

It happened this way: I was writing in the grape arbor, on the ledge by the creek that is hidden from the house by trees. He was right in front of me before I could put my notebook away. He snatched it from me and began to read. What is worse, he read aloud. I was embarrassed to death.

“No wife of mine is going to embarrass me with a lot of foolish, vulgar stuff,”
Mordecai read. (This is Ruel’s opinion of my writing.)
Every time he tells me how peculiar I am for wanting to write stories he brings up having a baby or going shopping, as if these things are the same. Just something to occupy my time.

“If you have time on your hands,” he said today, “why don’t you go shopping in that new store in town.”

I went. I bought six kinds of face cream, two eyebrow pencils, five nightgowns and a longhaired wig. Two contour sticks and a pot of gloss for my lips.

And all the while I was grieving over my last story. Outlined—which is as far as I take stories now—but dead in embryo. My hand stilled by cowardice, my heart the heart of a slave.

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Of course Mordecai wanted to see the story. What did I have to lose?

“Flip over a few pages,” I said. “It is the very skeleton of a story, but one that maybe someday I will write.”

“The One-Legged Woman,” Mordecai began to read aloud, then continued silently.

The characters are poor dairy farmers. One morning the husband is too hung over to do the milking. His wife does it and when she has finished the cows are frightened by thunder and stampede, trampling her. She is also hooked severely in one leg. Her husband is asleep and does not hear her cry out. Finally she drags herself home and wakes him up. He washes her wounds and begs her to forgive him. He does not go for a doctor because he is afraid the doctor will accuse him of being lazy and a drunk, undeserving of his good wife. He wants the doctor to respect him. The wife, understanding, goes along with this.

However, gangrene sets in and the doctor comes. He lectures the husband and amputates the leg of the wife. The wife lives and tries to forgive her husband for his weakness.

While she is ill the husband tries to show he loves her, but cannot look at the missing leg. When she is well he finds he can no longer make love to her. The wife, sensing his revulsion, understands her sacrifice was for nothing. She drags herself to the barn and hangs herself.

The husband, ashamed that anyone should know he was married to a one-legged woman, buries her himself and later tells everyone that she is visiting her mother.

While Mordecai was reading the story I looked out over the fields. If he says one good thing about what I’ve written, I promised myself, I will go to bed with him. (How else could I repay him? All I owned in any supply were my jars of cold cream!) As if he read my mind he sank down on the seat beside me and looked at me strangely.

“
You
think about things like this?” he asked.

He took me in his arms, right there in the grape arbor. “You sure do have a lot of heavy, sexy hair,” he said, placing me gently on the ground. After that, a miracle happened. Under Mordecai’s fingers my body opened like a flower and carefully bloomed. And it was strange as well as wonderful. For I don’t think love had anything to do with this at all.

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After that, Mordecai praised me for my intelligence, my sensitivity, the depth of the work he had seen—and naturally I showed him everything I had: old journals from high school, notebooks I kept hidden under tarpaulin in the barn, stories written on paper bags, on table napkins, even on shelf paper from over the sink. I am amazed—even more amazed than Mordecai—by the amount of stuff I have written. It is over twenty years’ worth, and would fill, easily, a small shed.

“You must give these to me,” Mordecai said finally, holding three notebooks he selected from the rather messy pile. “I will see if something can’t be done with them. You could be another Zora Hurston—” he smiled —“another Simone de Beauvoir!”

Of course I am flattered. “Take it! Take it!” I cry. Already I see myself as he sees me. A famous authoress, miles away from Ruel, miles away from anybody. I am dressed in dungarees, my hands are a mess. I smell of sweat. I glow with happiness.

“How could such pretty brown fingers write such ugly, deep stuff?” Mordecai asks, kissing them.

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For a week we deny each other nothing. If Ruel knows (how could he not know? His sheets are never fresh), he says nothing. I realize now that he never considered Mordecai a threat. Because Mordecai seems to have nothing to offer but his skinny self and his funny talk. I gloat over this knowledge. Now Ruel will find that I am not a womb without a brain that can be bought with Japanese bathtubs and shopping sprees. The moment of my deliverance is at hand!

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Mordecai did not come today. I sit in the arbor writing down those words and my throat begins to close up. I am nearly strangled by my fear.

page 56

I have not noticed anything for weeks. Not Ruel, not the house. Everything whispers to me that Mordecai has forgotten me. Yesterday Ruel told me not to go into town and I said I wouldn’t, for I have been hunting Mordecai up and down the streets. People look at me strangely, their glances slide off me in a peculiar way. It is as if they see something on my face that embarrasses them. Does everyone know about Mordecai and me? Does good loving show so soon? … But it is not soon. He has been gone already longer than I have known him.

page 61

Ruel tells me I act like my mind’s asleep. It is asleep, of course. Nothing will wake it but a letter from Mordecai telling me to pack my bags and fly to New York.

page 65

If I could have read Mordecai’s scribble pad I would know exactly what he thought of me. But now I realize he never once offered to show it to me, though he had a chance to read every serious thought I ever had. I’m afraid to know what he thought. I feel crippled, deformed. But if he ever wrote it down, that would make it true.

page 66

Today Ruel brought me in from the grape arbor, out of the rain. I didn’t know it was raining. “Old folks like us might catch rheumatism if we don’t be careful,” he joked. I don’t know what he means. I am thirty-two. He is forty. I never felt old before this month.

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Ruel came up to bed last night and actually cried in my arms! He would give anything for a child, he says.

“Do you think we could have one?” he said.

“Sure,” I said. “Why not?”

He began to kiss me and carry on about my goodness. I began to laugh. He became very angry, but finished what he started. He really does intend to have a child.

page 80

I must really think of something better to do than kill myself.

page 81

Ruel wants me to see a doctor about speeding up conception of the child.

“Will you go, honey?” he asks, like a beggar.

“Sure,” I say. “Why not?”

page 82

Today at the doctor’s office the magazine I was reading fell open at a story about a one-legged woman. They had a picture of her, drawn by someone who painted the cows orange and green, and painted the woman white, like a white cracker, with little slit-blue eyes. Not black and heavy like she was in the story I had in mind. But it is still my story, filled out and switched about as things are. The author is said to be Mordecai Rich. They show a little picture of him on a back page. He looks severe and has grown a beard. And underneath his picture there is that same statement he made to me about going around looking for Truth.

They say his next book will be called “The Black Woman’s Resistance to Creativity in the Arts.”

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Last night while Ruel snored on his side of the bed I washed the prints of his hands off my body. Then I plugged in one of his chain saws and tried to slice off his head. This failed because of the noise. Ruel woke up right in the nick of time.

page 95

The days pass in a haze that is not unpleasant. The doctors and nurses do not take me seriously. They fill me full of drugs and never even bother to lock the door. When I think of Ruel I think of the song the British sing: “Ruel Britannia”! I can even whistle it, or drum it with my fingers.

SEPTEMBER,
1961

page 218

People tell my husband all the time that I do not look crazy. I have been out for almost a year and he is beginning to believe them. Nights, he climbs on me with his slobber and his hope, cursing Mordecai Rich for messing up his life. I wonder if he feels our wills clashing in the dark. Sometimes I see the sparks fly inside my head. It is amazing how normal everything is.

page 223

The house still does not awaken to the pitter-patter of sweet little feet, because I religiously use the Pill. It is the only spot of humor in my entire day, when I am gulping that little yellow tablet and washing it down with soda pop or tea. Ruel spends long hours at the store and in the peanut field. He comes in sweaty, dirty, tired, and I wait for him smelling of Arpège, My Sin, Wind Song, and Jungle Gardenia. The women of the community feel sorry for him, to be married to such a fluff of nothing.