Faith and the Good Thing Page 14

  Faith wiggled the right toes on her foot cautiously. “Yes, I know.” But she wondered about that, about what she really knew of Maxwell. Her information was scanty. Sometimes, when she looked at him, he didn’t seem to be there at all. She saw a somewhat poorly polished gesture, but never anything she might call Maxwell. Not even when he was naked—even then he seemed heavily clothed with layers and layers of popular culture grafted on but never reaching to that level she could call Maxwell himself. Maybe he was like a suit of armor, empty inside. Regardless, it was easier to pretend he had no past—that they, like two slaves promenading on Sunday in their owner’s old clothes, had just met in the French Quarter in New Orleans, that they needed to know nothing other than that she was a woman and he was a man who would take care of her if they ran away from bondage. A suit of armor, after all, would shield her from the cold. Still, she remembered the salient elements of his life: attending one poorly equipped ghetto school after another, soaking up all the literature, books, and movies that presented an image of a more affluent life, and writing to purge himself of frustration. Unexpectedly, he won a scholarship to a junior college, and, just as unexpectedly, he graduated at the head of his class and gave a commencement-day speech on—you guessed it—“The Power of Will.” Faith closed her eyes. It was easier to pretend he had no past. “I know, Isaac,” she said.

  “It was crazy, Faith! Ragsdale looked up from my proposal and said, ‘It looks good.’ ” Maxwell stopped in the center of the floor, his face wooden and his shoulders hunched forward, a queer hitch in his voice. “I wish my father was around right now. It would have meant a lot to him, you know? He never really got off the bottom.” Maxwell pulled at his nose, sober, staring at Faith. “He was a janitor all his life and glad to be one. Sometimes I’d be at home, writing in a corner of the room, and he’d drag in from the plant with dust in his hair and eyes, and ask me what I was doing. And when I told him, he’d say, ‘There ain’t no place for a black boy who does that.’ You understand? He was whipped, Faith—somebody snuffed out the Will in him like you do a candle.” Perhaps Maxwell tasted something bad: he curled back his lips as if he did. “He pandered me! I couldn’t stand it. He thought I was weak and asthmatic and couldn’t do anything else—I mean, do hard work with my back like he did. But he was wrong, you see, because Lowell nodded his head and said they wanted to start the column in about a month, and Cummings told me to pick the prisoner I want to author it.” Maxwell smiled, a warm feeling in his chest. “I’ll get an extra day off—Monday, and about a hundred dollars a week more. . . .”

  Faith’s eyebrows raised. “A hundred?”

  “You can’t get rich in media, honey,” Maxwell laughed, “not unless you own the paper. That’s freedom of the press—the publisher’s free to print anything he wants. The point is that they’re finally giving me some responsibility—I can branch out, put some money away and, maybe, in a few years start my own magazine.” He looked straight into her eyes for the first time that evening. “They trust me.”

  “Faugh!”

  “What was that?”—Maxwell.

  “Nothing, maybe someone in the hallway.” Faith felt at a loss. She understood in a cerebral sort of way, not with her heart, his need for this thing. She even wanted him to have it. “I’m glad,” she said. It sounded false; she shot her voice up an octave: “I’m glad!”

  He seemed to believe her. “Anyway, I will branch out soon. It takes time, you know? If I show them I can handle this, maybe they’ll let me do a signed column next—on race or something. I’ve got some strong opinions on that. I’ve got time to move up and I’ve got potential. Ragsdale said so, those were his words. You know I wouldn’t toot my own horn.” For a second he was silent, visibly exhausted and a little bit high from so much speech; his shoulders slouched, his arms hung like slabs of beef on meathooks at his side. “What do you think?”

  “I think it’s wonderful,” Faith said. “I hope it turns out all right for you.”

  “For us!” Maxwell shouted. “I’m doing all this for both of us!” Then he smiled, wily, and laughed as he took her hands and lifted her off the sofa. “But you’ll have to act right, stay in a woman’s place, I mean.”

  Faith said, “Right,” and he released her, stepping in front of her living-room mirror to adjust his wig and smooth back his mustache with spittle. “We can talk about what I have in mind later. If we hurry,” he glanced at his wristwatch, “we can make it to the theater in time for the show. I can’t stand being late.”

  For the occasion, Faith dressed in a cream-colored, box-pleated skirt, argyle cardigan, and brown pumps, deciding, when she was inside Maxwell’s Buick, that the prospects for a life with him were propitious. She could push him; it wouldn’t be hard. They would work out a comfortable agreement, an unwritten contract involving, on his side, food, furniture, comfort, and security somewhere in the surrounding crime-free suburbs; and on her side, the provision of children, but not at first, cooking until they found someone to cover this inconvenience, and, of course, the obligatory sacrifice of sex Lavidia had found so abhorrent. She looked at his profile as he drove down Michigan Avenue, quieter now with couples strolling along the sidewalks, into restaurants, and toward the lakefront. Would he, at some unforeseen time, expect more than duty from her? She closed her eyes, experiencing first the play of light and patterns along her eyelids, then a vision that was brief but terrifying: suppose after thirty or forty years or so, after a lifetime of duty and coping and ceaseless arguments repeated so often they could start each one up anew at any point, at the beginning, middle, or end; suppose after fifty years they found themselves sitting across from each other in a semidark kitchen overlooking a quiet backyard of peonies, petunias, and sweet-smelling ferns, the sink filled with greasy dishes behind them, the walls lined with shelves of teapots that jingled “Tea for Two,” milk-glass statues, and placards engraved with kitchen prayers like:

  Bless my little kitchen, Lord,

  I love its every nook,

  And bless me as I do my work,

  Wash pots and pans and cook. . . .

  suppose they stared across that table, looking up from their untouched bowls of salad, glaring at the outlines of the kitchen, at the stark figures of the electric wall clock, the gigantic ornamental spoon and fork made of wood, the calendar they’d forgotten to change, the bulletin board covered with phone numbers with which they could associate no names, no faces; suppose in all that they peered at each other across the gulf between their lives like two duelers facing one another on some misty moor, wondering, in that brittle, graying age, Who is this? And, I—? Would he be openly hostile then? His hairline would stretch back behind his head, ending in gray fuzz. Hard old age would be upon him. He would wear blue-and-red suspenders that strained over an obscenely rotund belly. His toothless mouth would look like a fresh wound, and he would accuse her of his failures, his humiliations so sure to come. Faith smiled to herself, leaned over, and kissed Maxwell’s cheek. She would be just a wrinkle then—old, evil like Lavidia. But she remembered the statistics: 13,500 black men stricken dead as stone from hypertension, one out of every seven, the newspapers had said. They had twice the chance of collapsing from stroke as whites. Maxwell’s life expectancy would, if he was lucky, be no more than 64.1 years. She would outlive him; she could wait. He would begin wheezing and clutching his wrinkled throat at the table; his head would pitch forward into his salad bowl. She saw herself rising from the table, starting to dial the police or the fire department, then stopping, turning around, and descending the rubber-matted back stairs to the yard. She would bend down to the white peonies growing beside the sidewalk, bury her nose in one, and withdraw it filled with a fragrance as sweet as wine. Dew from the petals would be moist against her lips. She would smile, thinking of the insurance. . . .

  “I’m almost too worked up to enjoy the show,” Maxwell said. “I should be at home working on the column, you know? Turning over all the possibilities so—ha ha—nothing c
an slip through my fingers.” He glanced at her sheepishly, sly. “I never did tell you my whole theory of Will Power, did I?”

  “No,” Faith said, but she remembered the curious collection of books stacked along the floor of his bedroom. Some belonged to The Power Book Library and were long out of print. She had flipped through a few when he left to buy her a pack of cigarettes. The titles were peculiar: Power of Will, Will for Success, a few books by Horatio Alger, Colin Wilson, Norman Vincent Peale, and a slim one about a seagull. She hadn’t been able to make sense of any of them. “You never told me,” she said.

  Maxwell chuckled and began beating rhythms on the steering wheel with his palm. “It came to me when I was watching a Rose Bowl game—sort of like a revelation. All those men in conflict and one of them carrying the ball across the field through dint of pure Will. Beautiful!” He looked at her, all seriousness. “That’s life in a nutshell. Tennyson said it better than me—O living Will, thou shalt endure, When all that seems shall suffer shock. Will Power can overcome anything, you see? I know it for a fact, because whenever I feel an asthma attack coming on, I can just will it right away.”

  “You can?” Faith looked at him hard. “How?”

  “Pure strength of Will,” Maxwell snapped. He sucked at foreign matter in his teeth and shifted the car into fourth. “Will Power’s a self-preservative principle of evolution. I figured it all out. It’s superior to matter and stronger than mind, and that’s why man’s been able to survive on this miserable planet for so long. If nature threatened him, he could conquer it.” Maxwell’s right hand left the steering wheel; he held it out above the dashboard, drawing his fingers together in a tight fist. “A man can accomplish anything if his Will Power’s strong enough, Faith.” He seemed to remember something and lowered his hand, glancing sideways at her. “But you have to direct the Will toward what’s right and good, of course.”

  Faith slid up in her seat. “What is right?”

  “Security and comfort,” Maxwell laughed, still sucking at his teeth. “Being on top of things, having nice things, respect, a little authority—feeling like a man. Things like that.”

  She left that alone. It hung heavy in the close space of the car, like gas from a sick person’s bowels, until she, to clear the air, said, “I guess.” It didn’t matter what he thought, or if he thought at all, which was still questionable, as long as he was sweet. Sometimes. “That’s your theory?” she asked finally. “That’s all?”

  Maxwell reddened a little. “I know it needs some work. I’m not writing it up for Mind or the Philosophical Review, you know! All the implications aren’t worked out—I know that—but it’s how I feel about things and it helps me stay in the race.” He shoved out his lower lip and changed the subject. “You got our tickets?”

  She said, “Yes,” and produced them after Maxwell left his Buick in an underground parking lot and led her to the door of the theater. He guided her into an immense lobby embellished with Oriental decorations, then up four flights of red-carpeted stairs. From that height, the proscenium was minuscule, adrift at sea before hundreds of people seated below. Maxwell looked curiously at their tickets, then for their seats.

  “Those people,” he said finally, pointing to an old couple, “they’ve got our seats.”

  The couple looked nonchalantly at them. They were both nondescript, just an average, portly, moon-faced man and wife dressed in Sunday-service clothing, waiting for the show. Maxwell bent toward the man and tried to explain that those seats, paid for in advance, were his. The man said nothing. His face was like the cement in an old cellar, rough irregular lines lying thick and lumpy along a hard, white surface. He remained rooted in place like an oak. Maxwell perspired, fingered his respirator nervously, and returned angrily to Faith.

  “I’m going to get an usher,” he said. “I know those are our seats.” And he was gone, squeezing back out into the crowded, smoke-filled hallway. She waited, irritated by her full bladder, and afraid she’d miss Maxwell if she went searching for the women’s room. The billowing curtains before the stage below parted, and applause thundered around, below, and above her ears. A pianist appeared onstage, animated, his long fingers stroking the keys, his feet pumping the pedals, dark sunglasses flashing with floodlights directed his way and his head nodding with the melody now filling the auditorium. Faith exhaled nervously and pressed her thighs together. It would only take an instant to find the bathroom; she could be back before Maxwell returned with the usher. But she stayed, licking her dry lips and wringing her hands. She crossed her arms, then began to lose her fight with this sudden sense of dread that had no location, no cause; it broke free, not as she stood there pinching all her abdominal muscles together, but when she turned around and saw Maxwell returning with the usher, a six-foot bespectacled man wearing a blue uniform. He licked sleepily at his lips. She wanted to hide. It was Arnold Tippis.

  “We’ll get this thing straightened out right now,” Maxwell said. He turned to the usher, but Tippis stopped cold in the aisle, tearing off his glasses and gawking at Faith.

  “Where’ve you been hiding, girl?” Tippis cried. “You’ve got no idea what I’ve been going through trying to find you!”

  She was going to wet her pants. She knew it. Faith glanced at Maxwell, already halfway down the aisle, then at Tippis, who was sliding toward her. People seated around them began to stare, scowl, and hiss like broken ventilators. She started to back away, but felt herself losing control.

  Tippis placed his hand on her right arm and thrust his face near hers, saying, sotto voce, “I need somebody to talk to. You’ll listen, won’t you, Faith? I looked for you at the hotel, but Mrs. Beasley said you’d moved out a long time ago.” In the darkness of the theater she could hardly see his face.

  “Please,” Faith said, “take your hand off.” Its pressure was upsetting her delicate equilibrium of tightened muscles, squeezing from her what she knew would be a very embarrassing deluge of . . . “Please. . . .”

  “Things haven’t been right with me since I last saw you,” Tippis said. “There’s nobody to hear me out like you used to. Where are you staying? Faith, I’ve got to talk with you—”

  Maxwell bounded back up the aisle and stopped, swaying at Faith’s side. “What’re you talking about?” He stared at Faith, his face blue, his chest heaving. “You don’t know him, do you?”

  “Tell him, honey.” From Tippis. He put on his glasses and stared at Maxwell.

  “No,” Faith whispered. She inhaled deeply, imagining her bladder to be as gravid, as swollen and distended as a womb. It was swelling up inside her like a tumor, was about to explode—boom!—and drown them all.

  “No?” Tippis roared. He slipped his glasses on again. She could see the pain spring across his face, tightening his jaws and the muscles around his eyes and lips. Why couldn’t he go away before she had an accident? “Faith,” Tippis said, stumbling over his words, “you remember what we used to talk about—about how happiness and peace isn’t possible in society.” His face opened like a trapdoor. “But I was wrong! God, it is possible. When I was with you and when you heard me out I felt something like genuine tranquillity. . . .” Tippis bobbed his head and his voice shot up. “I see that now! You do need other people to be whole, to discover who you are—”

  All the while she said nothing, only held her stomach and groaned.

  Tippis cried aloud, “Faith, this is Arnold!” and stepped back, slipping off his glasses again as if they concealed his face. “Look at me, please,” he said, touching his cheek. “You act like you don’t know me!”

  Faith turned her head. Maxwell cocked his. Said: “What is this, anyway?”

  “You weren’t this cold before,” Tippis said. His voice had an edge on it. “Maybe you don’t need the money, or me, or anybody like you used to, but will you at least speak to me?”

  Maxwell had had enough. He squeezed between them, his back to Faith, and his chin lifted. “She said she doesn’t know you, fellah,” poki
ng his finger in Tippis’s chest.

  “But she does!” Tippis laughed, short and uneasy, pulled at his blue collar, and squinted at Maxwell. “Girls don’t forget men that once made a difference in their lives, especially when—”

  Then it began, the transformation of Isaac Maxwell. Before Tippis could complete his thought Maxwell slapped him—the sound like a shot, the force of it turning Tippis completely around. Maxwell looked at his stinging palm as though in a trance; he held it up to his face, fascinated, then stepped forward, smiling curiously, his legs stiff, and slapped Tippis again, exploring his sudden hatred, discovering himself through Tippis’s destruction.

  “Isaac!” Faith shouted. But she could not move.

  And Tippis took it passively, wind rushing out of him like a bellows when Maxwell drove his knee sharply into Tippis’s crotch—testing himself, moving from one insight to another. Faith screamed like a wild bird. She raked at Maxwell’s back, pulling away only pieces of yellow cloth as he showered the other with oaths and punches and pulled at his hair until a patch of bloody scalp came free in his hands. He turned, looked at Faith, and the valve to her bladder sprang open. Anger, children, had opened hallways in him, unlocked secret chests, and allowed him to chart in himself dark labyrinths that only the deep key of anger could disclose. So it was, children. So it often is. His eyes frightened her: wild, irascible, drunk, their vision inverted from the world to dark new dimensions Maxwell saw in himself. And enjoyed. The fight had been exhilarating; he’d heard every click, click, click of his confused life with clocklike deadliness during the fight, and felt—it was so obvious—truly whole for the first time, all the threads of his life converging and crystallizing at his moment of anger. But Tippis—his face was meat and blood. Below them, people looked up, and the musician stopped playing to stare.