The Last Noel (22 page)

Kaye backed away. “I'm not taking your watch.”

Noni said, “Forget it, Daddy, Kaye's a nightmare to give a present to.”

Tilden kept holding out the watch, looking up at the young black man, smiling. “Kaye's not going to hurt my feelings. He knows it means a lot to me to give him something when he's given me so much. He knows that.”

Finally Kaye moved forward, bent, and took the watch. “Thank you.” He nodded at the man.

“Thank you.”

“Well, Daddy, how'd you manage that?”

Tilden rolled back down onto the rug. “I'm a night owl, right, Kaye?”

“Right.” Kaye took off his plastic watch and replaced it with Tilden's. “A wise old night owl.”

Noni picked up her coat and gloves from the couch. “Kaye and I are going to Bunny's now, all right? I'll be back in a couple of hours. Michelle goes to bed at eight. Eight, no later.”

“Oh sure sure sure.”

“Oh sure sure sure,” repeated Michelle.

“And Daddy, if you do get hungry, the refrigerator's stuffed. Mom'll never notice.”

“I remember.” Tilden propped his still blond head on one elbow, looked at Noni and Kaye with the old lovely hapless smile. “You two,” he nodded to one, then the other. “You two are my favorite people—did you know that?—in the whole wide world.”

Michelle bounced a plastic black stallion up Tilden's chest and poked his chin with it. “What about
me
, Grandpoppy?”

“You're my favorite little girl.” He made no effort to stop her from dancing the little horse's hooves across his face. “You and the Princess.”

“Who's the Princess?”

Tilden pointed at Noni. “She is.”

Noni crossed to her father, knelt, brushed his hair back from his forehead, and kissed the familiar scent of alcohol and tobacco. His skin felt cool and smooth as marble. She picked up the drink from the rug. “Please eat some food, Daddy. Do you want me to make you a sandwich?”

“Hey, I was making sandwiches before you were born. Taste that, Kaye,” he pointed up at the glass Noni held. “That's a Zombie.”

Kaye took the drink from Noni, sipped it. “Zombie. You're getting to the end of the list here. You gonna start over?”

Tilden shook his head. “No, I think I'll call it quits. Zombie sounds like a good place to stop.” He rolled onto his stomach and Michelle crawled onto his back. “Kaye, soon as spring gets here, let's play some more golf. Take care of my Princess in this snow.”

“Always, Mr. T.”

In the old rebuilt Thunderbird, Kaye and Noni were bringing Parker along with them to Glade Lake, the affluent neighborhood where Bunny's parents, the Breckenridges,
lived, and where (home for the holidays) she was having her party. Parker hadn't been invited, but Noni (who had called ahead to ask if he might come) told him that Bunny had wanted to invite him, just hadn't been sure if he'd be in Moors for Christmas.

Parker laughed. “If Allah's into white chicks in heaven, He's sure gonna make you one of them. 'Cause, Lady Disco, you are lying like a rug on a rich man's floor.”

“No, it's true!” Noni turned around in the cracked red-leather bucket seat to protest.

“Oh sure,” said Kaye in her father's voice of soft skepticism.

When the three arrived at the huge modern glass and redwood house, the party was a loud crush of people, mostly, like them, in their twenties. The Breckenridge parents had abandoned their home and fled to relatives in Raleigh. Many of Bunny's guests were old high school classmates who hadn't seen much of each other in the last five years and had in common little but that shared past. The boys who'd had long hair in high school mostly had short hair now; the ones who'd had short hair then mostly had long hair now. Fewer of them smoked.

In large part the group was welcoming to Parker, although most awkwardly avoided questions about what he'd been up to since the old Moors High days.

Parker, who had a shaved head and a Kung Fu moustache, told Bunny he remembered her in the junior talent show, playing the guitar and singing. “You were whapping on the side of that gittar, doing this big voice Odetta/Georgia chain gang shit. ‘Huh. Huh. Huh! Oh Rosie oh Lawd gal, the Man done killed my convict pal. Huh. Huh. Huh!'”

Bunny laughed. “Was I awful?”

“Oh Lawd, gal.” He ate the Brie-filled mushroom she handed him. “But I gotta say, you had guts, those crackers guffawing at you.” Parker told Bunny he had converted to Islam
in prison and was getting ready to change his name to Kareem Aked.

Bunny, who had wild frizzy long mousy-brown hair and wore loose black caftans to hide her weight told Parker she was working on her Ph.D. in economics at the University of Chicago, and that she was keeping the name “Bunny” although it made her sound like someone who worked in a Playboy Club, because every time she heard it, it was a battle cry to war against the patriarchy.

Parker said, “Kick ass, Sister!” but declined her offered glass of chardonnay. He was a teetotaler now.

Bunny's older sister Mindy (the one who so long ago had asked Noni's brother Gordon to help escort the first black students into Gordon Junior High) was here from Atlanta with her husband; they manufactured something called “software” for computers and were doing quite well. She told Noni that sometimes she dreamt about Gordon.

From speakers embedded in the ceiling, music pulsed loudly: Elton John, the Pointer Sisters, Blondie, Carly Simon. Noni fast-danced with Parker, and slow-danced with a pleasant young lawyer named Lucas Miller, who confessed that he'd had a crush on her in high school. He wondered if she'd care to go out with him now. Noni thanked him, but said she was still married, although separated from her husband. He apologized for asking.

There was paté and a roast goose with ribbons on its legs and there were white pizzas. One of the pizzas had spinach on it and Kaye left the two other medical students he'd been talking with beside the huge raised fireplace in order to bring Noni a piece, making Doctor Jack's old joke about how she needed to eat spinach to build up her iron.

Noni was dutifully finishing the pizza slice when the Four Tops' “Reach Out, I'll Be There” began. Kaye looked at her, then held out his arms. “I bet I haven't danced in a year or more.”

Noni smiled, stepped into his arms. “It'll come back. You can do anything, remember?”

They danced so well together that people stopped to watch. They danced with the old rapport that they had had, practicing in Amma's kitchen when they were thirteen. Their bodies remembered more than they did.

But there was a difference now and they both felt it; those bodies had changed, felt less familiar, and the two of them were strangely more conscious of each other's hands, arms, hip bones, the small of her back, the length of his leg. They looked at each other, then they looked away, the intimacy in their eyes suddenly too strong for easy dancing.

Noni thought back to one of their practices in the kitchen at Clayhome, how Kaye had choreographed them in his bossing way. What had that song been? He'd mapped out every step. “All right. On ‘time goes by so slowly,' we open out like this. Got it? Outside arm out. We lead with the outside foot. Walk, walk, walk, walk. Time goes by so slowly / And time can do so much.' Walk, walk. That's right. Good. Now, we spin on Are you still mine?' Spin spin, Are you still,' now I'll dip you,
‘mine
?' Are you still mine?' Got it? Great, that's great. Boy, we're good.”

Around them as they danced at the Breckenridge house, the party went on. There was talk of whether Noni had left Roland or vice versa, and why. Whether their former class president was gay and if he was not, why was he still living with his college roommate? Whether their former head cheerleader was pregnant.

Kaye and Noni slow-danced while around them there was talk of Three Mile Island, new Swedish stoves,
Apocalypse Now
, pocket calculators, the Sugar Bowl, the Pritikin diet, the new discount mall, whether sexual fidelity was unnatural to the human species, and what the meaning of happiness might conceivably be.

Kaye and Noni fast-danced again while there was talk of whether Parker (or rather Kareem Aked) was guilty of what he'd gone to prison for, and if so what exactly had it been? Whether Kaye—who certainly had turned out a more handsome man than they had thought to conjecture—was involved with anyone, and if so, who.

There was talk about whether Bunny had slept with Kaye, with Noni, or with Parker; if with Parker, it might explain why he had come to this party, even if guilty of whatever crime had sent him to the state prison, if in fact prison was where he had been.

In fact, Parker
wasn't
at this party anymore, at least Noni and Kaye couldn't find him when they stopped dancing, although they searched through the house. They needed to leave so Noni could drop off a Christmas gift for Reverend Fisher who lived in the next block. She worried that perhaps she and Kaye, dancing, had paid too little attention to Parker, and that, feeling uncomfortable, he had left Bunny's without telling anyone, although he was miles from his own neighborhood and without a car.

But after another search through the house, and with Kaye's assurances that Parker could take care of himself, she finally agreed to go. The truth was, she wanted to get back to Heaven's Hill to check on Michelle and her father. She feared, not that her father would overdrink when in charge of the child, but that Michelle would talk him into letting her stay up way past her bedtime, just as Noni herself long ago had talked him into it.

Michelle was actually sound asleep in Noni's four-poster bed. Amma Fairley had come over to Heaven's Hill and found the child sleeping on the red leather couch beside Bud Tilden;
A Christmas Carol
was showing on the television. Amma had
brought Tilden a bowl of her Brunswick stew, which she knew he loved. In the past, she could always get him to eat her stew when nothing else would tempt his appetite.

Turning off the set as Ebenezer Scrooge leapt happily through the streets of London with Tiny Tim on his shoulder, Tilden lit a cigarette and gestured for her to sit down with him.

“Amma,” he said, “I've got a serious question for you.” He wondered if Amma wouldn't agree that we don't need ghosts, like the ghosts who visit Scrooge, to show us visions of our ruined pasts and our unhappy present and our doomed futures.

She told him she wasn't sure what he meant.

“I mean, don't we have those visions with us all the time anyhow? All the time. And you know what, our knowing what we've done, what we've left undone—it doesn't help one bit, Amma, it doesn't change us at all. There's a book,” he pointed at the shelves where rows of music boxes had now replaced his collection of Great Books. “A Greek philosopher said, To know the good is to do the good.' But, Amma, who was he kidding?”

Amma carried Tilden's untouched cocktail from the coffee table and poured it down the drain of the wet bar sink. “Well, Mr. Tilden—”

“How many years have we known each other? Thirty?” He took her hand. “Thirty? Do I call you Mrs. Fairley?”

Amma patted his hand, removed hers. “If you knew what the right thing to do was, why wouldn't you do it?”

He laughed, put out his cigarette. “Oh, Amma. You'd do the right thing. That I do know. Noni'd do the right thing. But that's all I know on earth and all I need to know. You think Noni and Kaye'll ever get together?”

She stiffened, stood to leave. “I don't know if they will or not.”

“But you think they shouldn't? Hang on, don't go. Hell, they're probably seventh cousins anyhow. What do you bet?
You know damn well, Amma, your family and Judy's family have been all mixed up together for the past two hundred years.”

Amma did know this, knew that in the long oral history of the Clays there were tales of nocturnal visits by Gordon men to Clayhome women. She had been told that her greatgrandfather was actually, secretively, a Gordon, and that was why her eyes were amber and her skin cinnamon. But Amma said none of this, and didn't want to. All she said in the doorway was, “Mr. Tilden, you carry this child up to bed for me and then you come on down to the kitchen and eat some of my stew. You're not looking too good.”