The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey (26 page)

“When you met me, I was, was confused, right?”

“A l’il bit.”

“A lot. But then I went to this doctor, and now it’s like I’m a whiz kid on the radio. I know everything I ever known. I know things that I didn’t know fifty years ago when they happened. Who else but the Devil gonna give you all that?”

“The medicine make you hot?”

“Yeah. It sure does. Tell me sumpin’, Shirley.” He squeezed her hand and she smiled at the tabletop.

“What’s that?”

“Who are you?” It was a question he had never asked before. Naked and unadorned, it was like something Coy would have asked a young girl he was courting.

“I ain’t nobody.”

“Now, I know that ain’t true ’cause I can see you right there in front’a me. I feel your fingers, see your pretty face.”

“Mr. Grey,” she complained.

“You know, Shirley, I wouldn’t push you if I was a young man. Back a long time ago we would’a been up in a bed before I asked you ’bout your favorite color or what you do when they ain’t nobody else around.”

“Please, Mr. Grey, Ptolemy, don’t say them kinda things to me. I’m a shy woman.”

“Men like me like shy women. We see ’em an’ wanna tickle ’em, you know?”

“I was born in Tulsa,” Shirley Wring said. She brought out her other hand to hold his. “But there was a depression and so my daddy took us to California. We got to a rich man’s estate outside’a Santa Barbara . . . lookin’ for work. But instead he let us live in a big cabin by the ocean that was on his land.”

“What your father do for that man?” Ptolemy brought out his other hand.

“Oh,” Shirley said, “he didn’t do nuthin’. That rich man was a Communist and he just wanted to do somethin’ nice for his fellow man.

“We lived there for ’leven years. My first memories is the sound of waves and things that washed up from the sea. My first boyfriend was a little blond-headed boy named Leo who lived in the big house with his sister. They were the rich man’s grandson and granddaughter. We’d swim in the ocean every day, almost.”

Shirley smiled, her eyes gazing backward in time. Ptolemy knew that look. He’d spent many years watching his own youth. He had stared so hard that the vision blurred and the memories were shut away.

“That’s wonderful,” he said. “But how did you eat or get the other things you needed?”

“Mr. Halmont, that was the old white man, he gave us food and anything we asked for. My mother made our clothes and my father drove one of Mr. Halmont’s old cars.”

“Eleven years,” Ptolemy marveled. “Eleven years livin’ by the ocean an’ you didn’t even have to lift a finger. Did they make you go to school?”

“Leo and his sister had a tutor, and they let me sit with them. We studied in English and in French, but don’t ask me to speak French. I lost that tongue a long time ago.”

Ptolemy rubbed his fingertips across the back of Shirley’s left hand. Their skins were wrinkled and brittle, two tones of deep, earthy brown. Ptolemy’s heart stuttered, partly because of a feeling that he’d forgotten, and also because he sensed a tragedy.

“Why you leave that house on the beach?” he asked.

Shirley shook her head but said nothing.

Their hands moved together, tangled, Ptolemy thought, like seals playing in the surf of Shirley Wring’s long-ago ocean yard.

“My father and Mr. Halmont used to talk about the world of communism. Every night Daddy would come home and tell us about how in Russia men was just men and there wasn’t no difference in the races or anything.”

“And your father believed that nonsense?”

“My mother was scared, but finally one day Daddy decided to move to L.A. and get a job in a defense factory and work with Mr. Halmont to organize the workers—black and white.”

“Did they kill him?” Ptolemy asked.

Shirley put her forehead against his hand and nodded.

 

 

 

They left the sour taste of their talk and went into the living room. When they were seated on Robyn’s couch, Ptolemy took Shirley’s hands in his, pressing his fingers against her palm.

“What’s this?” she said.

Looking into her hand, she saw the emerald ring she’d left with Robyn.

“Will you be my friend for the rest of our life, double-u ara eye en gee?”

She kissed his lips and threw her arms around his neck. It was the embrace he’d always run after. It was his only chance and his downfall. There was nothing like it in the world.

“You’re hot, Ptolemy.”

“Woman like you in my arms, it’s a wonder I don’t burn up.”

“I like it, because I’m always so cold,” she said.

They sat back, facing each other as well as their ancient bodies would allow. Their arms and hands were tangled up together, their shoes were touching.

“What about you?” Shirley asked.

“You mean you wanna know who I am?”

She nodded and smiled and caressed his cheek with her right hand, the hand that wore their ring.

“That there’s a hard question,” he said. He kissed her fingers, pretending in his mind that he was a younger man who had the right to do such a thing. “I mean, if you asked me any other time I’da had a answer. That answer might not’a been right or true, but I would’a believed it, and so would you have. But, but now it’s all different.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I nevah been the kinda person go out an’ do sumpin’ first,” he said. “I usually look at somebody else and see what they was doin’ and either I’d join in or walk away. My first wife wanted to get married and so that’s what I did. I didn’t really want it, and she knew it, but we had kids and stuck it out for a while. Kids hated me. My ex-wife did too—before she died. But that was okay.

“My second wife come to me before her first marriage was ovah. Come right up to my door. We loved each other, an’ she died by my side, while I was sleep.”

Shirley squeezed his wrist.

“But that’s not what I’m talkin’ ’bout,” Ptolemy continued. “I know all that stuff. That’s who I
was
, but I ain’t like that no more.”

“What are you like now, Mr. Grey?”

Ptolemy inhaled, feeling the breath come into him. It felt like a hot wind rushing through a valley of stone. His heart pulsed, which for some reason brought to mind the moon in its sky.

“First there was you, Shirley Wring,” he said, or maybe Coy said through him.

“Me?”

“Yeah. I was like a blind man on a clear day. I lived in the dark of my eyes, and then you walked up and spelled your name and I remembered it. That was the first thing I remembered right off for the first time in years. You give me that treasure but what was even better was when I give it back. That was before I fount out that Reggie was dead, before I knew that Hilly stoled from me. That was before Robyn, and before I met the Devil behind his garden of roses and a green door.

“But it all started out with you. Reggie tried, but now that I look back on it I can see that he was a good boy but he couldn’t see the man in me. I was a chore that he did every couple’a days. That’s what old people turn into, chores for the young.”

Shirley hummed her agreement and kissed Ptolemy’s hand.

“And most of ’em don’t even take on that responsibility,” she said.

“If I coulda thought about it I woulda killed myself,” Ptolemy said. “But instead I met Satan and he injected me with his fire. Here I been runnin’ from fire ever since my childhood friend died in the blaze, and when I stopped runnin’ they put a fire in my blood.”

“And what you gonna do now?” Shirley asked.

“Robyn gonna be my heir,” he replied. “I’m gonna ask her to take care’a my estranged children, my family and friends, and, and, and you.”

“Me?”

“Yes, you. You and my great-great-grandnephew and niece and their aunt Niecie.”

“All them?”

“That’s what Coy McCann told me to do and I’ma do it.”

Upon the last word uttered the door to the apartment came open. Robyn, loaded down with four shopping bags, stared at the old folks holding each other on the couch.

Ptolemy turned toward his heir and smiled but Shirley gasped and pulled away from him. She disentangled her arms from his and pulled her feet away too.

“What’s goin’ on?” Robyn asked.

“Me an’ Shirley talkin’ ’bout our past,” the fevered old man said.

“I bet you were.”

“I got to be goin’, Mr. Grey, Ptolemy,” Shirley said.

She got to her feet and looked around, finally seeing her red purse behind her on the couch. Robyn saw it too. She put down her shopping bags and picked up the cherry-red leather sack.

“Thank you,” Shirley said.

Robyn grunted and frowned at her elder.

“Good-bye,” Shirley said to both of them.

“You don’t have to go, Shirley,” Ptolemy said, getting to his feet.

“Oh, no, I mean, yes I do. But I will call you,” she said. “I’ll call.”

She scuttled out the door, which Robyn had not closed because her hands were full. Shirley didn’t close it either, and so Ptolemy walked to the front. Shirley stopped at the end of the hall and turned back. She smiled across the concrete expanse and Ptolemy waved at her, though he doubted if she could see.

When he turned away, after Shirley was gone, he met Robyn’s stony stare.

“Why you got to be rude to my friend?” he asked, unintimidated by the anger in her face.

“Why you got to be makin’ out with her on my bed?”

“Girl, I’m ninety-one.”

“I know what I saw. You was just movin’ back from a kiss when I come in here.”

“Kiss?”

“You got your own bed,” Robyn said. “You could take her up in there.”

He had had this argument many times in his life. Sensia could tell when he was holding back from turning his head to see a fine woman’s gait. Bertie, his first wife, once got mad because he left a fifteen-cent tip instead of a dime for a cute waitress.

“But, baby,” he’d said to at least a dozen women, “I didn’t mean nuthin’.”

But he had meant it. He had.

Robyn’s hands had become fists and her cheek wanted to quiver.

He turned away, walked into his bedroom, and closed the door on the rippling seas of love.

He went to the bureau and took out one of the Devil’s tiny pills. His fever was raging. He could hear it boiling in his ears, feel it huffing like a bellows against his rib cage.

He swallowed the profane medicine and smiled.

 

 

 

Later on, sitting in Sensie’s wicker chair by a window that looked out on the barren concrete yard, Ptolemy opened his mind.

A child had come to his door two years after he and Sensia were married. She was eleven years old and her face was his face on a girl-child’s head. Her name was Pecora and she had been living in a foster home with five other girls.

“I don’t wanna live there no more,” Pecora, who was named for her mother, had said.

“Why not?”

“’Cause they nasty an’ mean an’ you my real father an’ my mother have died.”

“I cain’t take you,” Ptolemy said. He didn’t question that she was his, one look at that face and he knew it must be true. He and Pecora Johnson had spent a weekend together a dozen years earlier, but she never said anything about a child.

Ptolemy and Sensia had discussed children, and Sensia said that she was no mother and so would have no child.

Ptolemy had girded himself against his own blood frowning at him and Pecora turned away. He watched the child walk down the hall. She got all the way to the door, and he would have let her go into the cold arms of the street except that Sensia came home just then. All she had to do was look into Pecora’s eyes and she knew everything: that this was her husband’s love child, that she had come seeking shelter, and that Ptolemy turned her away because he didn’t want to lose Sensia’s love.

“Come on in with me, child,” Sensia said.

Pecora and Ptolemy had two things in common: their faces and their love of Sensia Howard.

“I started her out on the road,” Ptolemy would say to Sensia, “but you brought her home.”

 

 

 

Yes?” he said when she knocked.

“Can I come in?” Robyn asked through the door.

“Come on.”

She had been wearing jeans and a red T-shirt when she’d come in from shopping, but now she wore a green dress that made her look younger.

“I’m sorry, Papa Grey,” Robyn said from the doorway. “I didn’t mean to get all mad. It wasn’t my bed right then but just a couch in the livin’ room and what you do ain’t none’a my business anyway.”

“Come on in an’ sit down, baby,” Ptolemy said to the girl.

Robyn slouched into the room and sat at the edge of the bed across from his wicker chair.

Robyn had her head down while Ptolemy looked at her, thinking that every heartbeat in his chest was like a grain of sand through an hourglass.