And Do Remember Me (13 page)

“I didn’t think you would want me if you knew. I didn’t think you could love me,” she whispered into his chest, holding him so tightly, her grip so strong, he could barely breathe.

And as much as the revelation arrived like some terribly belated gift, it changed everything. Now he knew why she was a phantom in his arms, why she often seemed to barricade herself against him. And, as Pearl had feared, the knowing was unbearable. At first he felt betrayed by the years of silence. Then he fell in love with her all over again, because she had borne what she had borne, because she could laugh, could make jokes, could offer affection despite all that. He was determined not just to love her, but to save her. To save her for himself. One day she would mend. He would be the cure.

He heard Pearl moving in the kitchen, putting the wine bottle back in the refrigerator. He saw the light go out and heard her return to the bed. He closed his eyes and turned on his side, pretending to sleep.

W
HEN
L
INCOLN
offered her a role in the play Raj was producing, Pearl rejected the idea. She was hungry for affirmation of her talent from another source, and longed to play roles different from the ones Lincoln created. An orphan, he wrote domestic
dramas whose characters fled from, rather than found, solace in the family circle. Misunderstandings, petty betrayals, reconciliations that came too late marked the thematic tapestry Lincoln Sturgis had created. His men were strong-willed, capable of raging with a kind of oblique grandeur, like the man who had in the end become his father, J. R. Sturgis. His women were elusive, flighty, seldom bound to home and hearth. Pearl had played a hundred roles Lincoln had created. And now she wanted to see if she could do something more, something different.

But sitting in the audience next to Lincoln on opening night, she wished she had taken the role he offered, for the voice, the tone, the core of the play he had written was richer and more powerful than anything he had done before. Watching it unfold, Pearl could hardly wait for the play that would follow this one. The audience was rapt, silent with breathless waiting. There were no listless coughs, no one shifting in seats, only an articulate union between audience and actors that Pearl wished fervently she was a part of.

During the reception afterward, in a large hall in the same building as the theater, Pearl watched as members of the audience came up to shake Lincoln’s hand, and theater friends congratulated him on the play. Then Raj entered the room, pushing his way through the crowd, moving toward Lincoln like a hurricane, and shaking his hand mightily in congratulations.

He always made her feel afraid. When she was around Raj, Pearl felt as though she were strangling. He came to their apartment sometimes and he and Lincoln would sit talking, laughing, plotting their artistic strategy. The muscularity of their movements, the intensity of their conversation, always drove her from the room. Raj wore his maleness as starkly as a confession, Pearl thought. She hated the condescending tone he used when addressing her, the way his voice dropped a register,
the way he always seemed to be joking with her, never taking her seriously. She hated most the way he looked at her sometimes as though he knew everything about her. Pearl could almost feel herself shrink, disappear, when she was around him. She told Lincoln how Raj made her feel, but he convinced her that her instincts, this time, were wrong. She could sense the respect that he held for Raj, how he thought he was a genius, mostly, Pearl thought, because he wrote plays nobody could understand, but nobody wanted to admit to finding indecipherable.

Suddenly Pearl felt Raj beside her. It was always like that. She felt him before she saw him. He smiled down at her, familiar, too comfortable, too easy, and said, “You should be proud of your old man.”

“I am.”

“He’s gonna go far. Are you ready for that?”

“I think that’s really a question Lincoln should ask me.”

“Yeah, maybe you’re right about that. Maybe you’re right.”

He was dressed in splendid green and gold African robes and a fez capped his bushy Afro. He folded his arms across his chest and in that one movement made Pearl feel trapped.

“Lincoln tell you I’m thinking about putting together a company?”

“He mentioned it.”

“Why don’t you try out for it?”

“Maybe I will,” Pearl said, hoping the lie would get him to leave.

Instead Raj’s eyes swept her face with a surgical look. He laughed, saying quietly, “Don’t shit me. I know you got no plans to audition for any company I put together. I know you don’t like me. I just don’t know why.” He turned and left Pearl standing in the corner alone, headachy and tense. She joined Lincoln then, making a great show of kissing him and smiling in happiness, hoping Raj would see.

——

T
HE PLAY RECEIVED
favorable reviews and ran for nearly three months. Lincoln got an agent and began work on his next play. Then in the spring, Pearl got her first stage role in a play being developed by a theater group in Rutgers, New Jersey. She was chosen for one of the three roles in the play after her third callback. She quit her receptionist job and threw herself into the rehearsals. The play opened and closed after four weeks, but her work had been seen by a director casting an Off-Off Broadway play who asked her to read for a supporting part and she got it.

T
HIS
WAS LOVE
. Forget about songs on the radio. Poems. Valentine cards. Scented letters scripted in a passionate, precise hand.
This
was love—the audience on its feet, arrayed before the actors like a roomful of flushed supplicants, so full, so satisfied. Pearl thought the applause would never stop. The audience was content just to stand and gaze upon
them
, the source of their surprise, the reason for the utter fulfillment that they feared would evaporate once they left the theater, once the lights went down, and the actors marched off the stage. So they clapped to honor the life that had surfaced on the stage, and filtered into the recesses of something they knew, suspected, denied, cherished, hid. To receive this homage, they stood with their hands clasped, like loving brothers and sisters, forgetting the dressing room fights, the on-stage competition. This sound would ring in her head for days. When a bill they couldn’t pay came in the mail, or Lincoln asked again for what she could not give, Pearl would remember this sound, and this feeling. She
would open the magic box and take a whiff. The muscles in her cheeks were sore from smiling, her fingers ached from holding Jason’s bony hand, but she could stand here forever. Yes,
this
was love.

I
T WAS
5
A.M
. and Lincoln and Pearl sat in the kitchen waiting for the sun to come up. They had stumbled into the apartment an hour earlier, from a party in Queens that was catching its second wind as they left. They had driven from Queens in the used Ford Lincoln had recently bought, sharing a joint of marijuana, stopping at McDonald’s, eating their fries and burgers in the car. Now they sat across from each other at the kitchen table, tired, dazed, but too pumped up by contentment to sleep.

“You know, I don’t think I’ve ever seen the sun come up, at least I don’t remember if I have,” Pearl said, sipping a cup of tea.

“You’d remember if you had.”

“I wish we had a camera so you could take a picture of it,” Pearl said.

“The sun comes up everyday, honey; if we don’t get a picture of it now we can get a picture of it tomorrow.”

“The sun comes up every day. I like that,” Pearl said, smiling so easily that Lincoln could not bear the happiness he felt just looking at her.

“Pearl, you ever thought about getting married?” he asked, easing the words out gently, casting his eyes down at his hands, measuring the rhythm of his voice.

“Married?” she asked, as though she did not quite know what he meant.

“Yeah, you know, married. You ever think about us getting married?”

“Do you?” she asked.

“I have been lately.”

She had been leaning toward him across the table, her hands touching his, her breath close and warm on his face, and then she pulled back, as though stung by his words.

“Well, why, Lincoln?”

“Why not?” he asked, growing queasy with distress.

“Why do we have to go and do that?”

“Why wouldn’t you want to?” he pressed her.

Pearl shifted in her chair and looked out the window without answering. For a long time she watched the sun filling the sky, while Lincoln sat watching her, hating the way she made him feel powerless in this moment of truth, the way she reduced his desire to an afterthought. And when she turned back to him she said quietly, yet with certainty, “I wouldn’t make a good wife, Lincoln. You deserve better. Better than me.”

“You’ll never forget, will you?”

“How can I?”

“I want to protect you, Pearl. I want to take care of you. I want you to be mine.”

“Lincoln, it’s too late for that. Too late. It was too late when you first met me.”

“Then what has all this meant?”

“I don’t know.”

If he could have moved at that moment he would have slapped her. But he couldn’t move, he felt too awful. He watched her walk to the window and stand there gazing out at the street. At last Lincoln found that he could move. He walked up behind her and said, “Just think about it, Pearl, think about it, that’s all I ask.”

“All right, Lincoln, I’ll do that,” she said, her voice as bright
as the sun that had just come up, promising absolutely nothing.

When the play ended its run, after nearly ten months, Pearl didn’t work again for almost a year. Then in quick succession she got a few roles as an extra for a television drama, and was offered an understudy role in the touring company of a prizewinning drama by a black playwright that had run on Broadway for two years. When the play hit Boston, she spent as much time as she could with Macon, who was working on her master’s degree in sociology at Boston University.

“H
E WANTS TO
marry me. Can you believe that?” Pearl asked as they sat on the sofa in the living room of Macon and Courtland’s South End apartment. There was a tentative, groping quality in Macon now that Pearl had sensed over the phone when she called to tell her that she had arrived and what hotel she was staying at. She had heard it in the eager breathlessness with which Macon had said over the phone, “Girl, I’m so glad you’re here.”

“I think you’re the only one who can’t believe he wants you,” Macon said. “Of course he wants you.”

“I just didn’t expect it, that’s all. Especially not after all this time.”

“I gather you told him no,” Macon said, questioning Pearl like a dissatisfied prosecutor grilling a witness for the defense.

“I didn’t really tell him yes or no.”

“Do you love him?”

“As much as I can, I do.”

“As much as you can?”

“That’s right. Probably the most important thing Lincoln’s given me is a home. I remember him telling me that J. R. Sturgis, the man who adopted him, gave him a name, and how much that meant to him. Well, Lincoln gave me a home. A home where I could feel safe and wanted and that has meant everything to me.”

“But, Pearl, you both made a home together. It wasn’t just Lincoln. It wasn’t just you. That’s what he wants to hold on to. That’s what he wants to make special. He’s a good man, Pearl.”

“I told him I can’t belong to anybody.”

“Oh, Pearl, how could you say that?”

“Because it’s the truth,” Pearl insisted, angrily clutching at this belief as if for dear life.

“It is if you want it to be. I’ve told you for a long time that you need to see someone.”

“Yeah, and what you’re talking about is for crazy I-got-the-time-and-the-money white folks.”

“It’s not. You don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s for everybody, anybody.”

“Not for black folks.”

“Oh, so that’s your excuse now? Pearl, you don’t have to carry all this alone. You don’t need to,” Macon pleaded. “You’re a black woman and so you think your back is a bridge. You’re afraid tears are a form of treachery, admitting pain is a sin.”

“Oh, come off it, Macon, don’t psychoanalyze me.”

“It’s not just you. Me. In a sense every one of us. You hold on to that pain because you think it’s your birthright, the only thing besides the contempt of the white world that really belongs to you.”

“Stop, Macon.”

“Why should I? From the moment you told me what happened to you, I had a vested interest in helping you get over,
through, beyond it. Don’t you understand, Pearl? I’m no analyst, I’m your friend.”

“One day I almost did. I almost did,” she said quietly. Pearl was sitting on a hassock beside an aquarium, her chin resting on her knees, her arms hugging her legs.

“I had a little money saved up from when I was in that play last year and I looked in the Yellow Pages, and called one up, even made an appointment, but I never went. I never went. The morning I was supposed to go, I woke up and knew I couldn’t do it. Don’t you see, Macon, it’s not just telling them that it happened, they’ll make me relive it. Relive him. Go back there.”

“That’s all they can do, Pearl.”

“Well, I won’t go,” she shouted, “I won’t go.”

Macon suddenly possessed complete knowledge of the courage Pearl had mustered to open the Yellow Pages, to find the right listing, decide on a name, and then to dial the number, commit to a day and time, that in imagination would become as much a death sentence as a promise of freedom. And though there really were no words for what she felt, Macon said, “I understand,” convinced that somehow she did.

They sat talking for a while about the tour, the cities Pearl had seen, the other actors in the play, about Boston and the people Macon and Courtland had met. They talked, luxuriating in the sound of their voices intertwined, purposeful. They prepared dinner together—just the two of them—since Courtland was out of town. Then while watching an old Bette Davis movie on television, Pearl asked, “What about children? Have you and Courtland thought about that?”