Faith and the Good Thing Read online

  “You sho?”

  Faith nodded. Timidly, she handed him a napkin.

  “Lord, Lord, Lord!” Jones whistled through his teeth. He looked at the half-eaten sandwich in his hand, frowned as though it held horse or stringy hippogriff, then flung it over his shoulder. He fell backward, spreading his arms on the grass, and groaned. “If that don’t take the rag right off the bush! Me—a father! Hit don’t make no sense. My works, those’re my kids; that makes more sense.” He reared up, his jaw hanging as though unhinged: “How long you known this?” Jones’s eyes half closed, became slits. “You sure hit ain’t Isaac’s baby?”

  “It couldn’t be.” Faith shivered at the image of Maxwell sleeping on the sofa in the living room, afraid to approach her, uncertain what reaction would spring forth from their touch. She scooted close to Jones, but he inched back instinctively. She started to reach for him, but her hand fell midway in futility. She blurted, before thinking, “Don’t close me out, Alpha!” Then tried to pull herself together, tugging at the fingers on her left hand. “I saw a doctor yesterday. I’m almost five months along. . . .”

  Grabbing his napkin, Jones wiped furiously at his lips, so roughly she feared he’d smear them away. “Does Isaac know?” he said.

  “I haven’t told him yet. I’m afraid. . . .”

  He grabbed her shoulders, held her upright, and thrust his head close to her. Again, she didn’t know him. Jones spoke slowly, deliberately. Making himself known. “I can’t have no kids. I’m an experiment, y’see? Honey, I’m different—I can’t settle down, or raise kids, or nothin’ like that. I’m . . . an artist.” His eyes narrowed. “I’m outside things, not ’cause I want to be, but because nature did somethin’ strange to me—gave me a screwed-up nervous system so I see things different from most people, and have some slim muscular control that lets me paint.” His breathing had become an ordeal, a painful thing to both their ears. “I’ve got to be free—to move around, to work, or loaf, but mainly to experiment with those goddamn paints, and finally with myself. See? I’ve got to see if a good idea can be made real. That means I’m going to suffer, hit means I’m going to be frustrated, and die inside, and wake up in gutters or in hotels with strange women, or—” In his eyes Faith saw him lose the thought. He wasn’t seeing her, but something else, a vision that attracted yet repelled him. “That’s what I am: a hypothesis. That’s right, a theme. And I can’t let nothin’ tie me down until I see how far the damn theme goes. . . .” Jones squeezed her harder, almost at the point of tears. “You’re going to tell Isaac hit’s his, aren’t you?”

  Watching him, she was amazed: full of wonder. “I don’t want to lie—I don’t want to hurt him, or you, or anybody!”

  “Somebody’s gonna get hurt,” Jones cried. His face flushed, tightened and released like a fist. “My life’s the idea of what I can be, honey. I can’t give that up!” Suddenly, calculation came into his eyes. Reason. “You’ve got a little money saved. You can get rid of hit—”

  “No! I won’t!”

  She was on her feet, retreating backward. Jones said, “I’m trying to be reasonable,” and, with that, Faith started running, abandoning her shoes and purse to race across the park. By the time Jones caught her both her feet were grass-stained and wet. Brown and green. And she was crying.

  “I can’t let this thing tie me down,” he said. “I’m not being selfish. Hit’s just that my life’s not my own—hit’s for art—the idea of perfection!”

  She would not look at him. He shook her—hard.

  “I’m sorry. I never meant for you to think I was free, that I could live like other men.” His voice went flat and empty. “We’ll think of somethin’. . . .”

  Faith pushed him away and stood back, bitter, her voice husky and broken. “You don’t want it!”

  “Of course I do. I’m glad,” he choked. “Hit’s . . . the best thing that ever happened to me. . . .”

  He coaxed her back to their original spot and, without speaking, began folding the checkered tablecloth and dropping their paper cups and cellophane wrappers into a metal trash can at the edge of the quiet park. As they walked spiritlessly to her new car, a sliver of bright steel by the curb, Jones said, “We’ve got to look at this thing from every possible angle, take into account what we know can’t give, like my responsibility to this idea. That’s got to go on, hit’s my life—my purpose!” Inside the car he sighed. “Hit’s all so tricky. . . .”

  “You’re making it tricky!” Faith cried. “What’s more important to you—painting, or me?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “I—” She could not find her voice; the silence was a boulder lying across her brain.

  “Hit’s not that simple,” Jones pleaded. “You don’t understand.” He kissed her with all the tenderness he could muster when she stopped in front of his building, then hurried out the curb door.

  Faith called after him, “What am I going to tell Isaac?”

  (That we had a good time? That I met and gave myself to a man who had another mistress, a man as strange as a centaur who thought so little of his life and mine and this child’s that he would forsake us for a daydream. God, no. . . .)

  “Don’t tell him anything,” Jones said, returning to the car. He smiled down at her and stroked her hand through the window. “I’ll go to his office before he leaves. We’ll get this whole thing straightened out.” Then he disappeared into his doorway.

  As always, he put her at ease, but only slightly. She could watch him painting, her jealousy fading before the enchantment of the creative process—the painstaking application of paint, the corrections that brought to life something somehow beautiful and more real than all the things out there. He couldn’t be blamed for his reaction. After three years of living away from the sunlight in a tiny cell he had a right to his freedom. Just the same, it disturbed her. From the moment she knew she was pregnant she realized that a portion of her bondage had come to an end. The thing moved inside her in some warm, deep place like sea depths where insects are spawned, or some immense vale so fertile your spit could make a thousand salvias burst like fireworks from their seeds. She could not hate him. Through him she was no longer apart from the mysteries of the earth, but involved in them. He had given her Big Todd’s truth: only through the stranger, or one stranger than yourself, could you seize your own life’s meaning. But he, like all men, was a stranger to her, to the earth, and was driven by a restlessness, a disease she only now understood. It had stricken Lynch and Brown and Barrett alike, had laid its heavy hand on Big Todd—suffocating them with a sense of fragility and foolishness before the rhythm of the world. She knew that was it—life was music and they could not dance, had no steps, so to speak, and stood there on the gigantic dance floor of existence, sulking and sneering at those who did dance. They could not be content as the humble caretakers of the garden of creation, could not create as she, or God, or a risible old witch woman could; they could not conjure beauty from the nothingness of all our lives. They were the dead living. Yet she had that connection with things, that capacity to dance if the universe said so, to sing if it demanded song. Unable to create, to conjure life from darkness, men railed against the world. Brown worshiped it to gain its favor, Lynch dissected it, Alpha painted it, Tippis—unable to change it—changed himself, Maxwell ignored it. Creation—conjuring, dancing to the world’s grim mi, fa, mi, for all men was a queer thing—it couldn’t be controlled, couldn’t be bought, or captured on canvas, or bent to fit a desperate dream; above all, it couldn’t be ignored. Then how did a woman—be she whore or housewife, shrew or saint, witch or virgin—seize that mystery? Deep within, Faith knew she harbored that secret. In a man’s world she was denied so much. Conquest was forbidden; passion was forbidden; freedom was impossible: what remained? the biological superiority? creation? and how then creation? The child, in an odd way, was the answer—it was all history focused on a single point—a trillion amoebae, plants, and animals martyred by evolution to produce ju
st this one child and no other, holding in microcosm all epochs, or so she believed; it pointed to every beast and tree and transformation of life, of that peculiar dance that had to be before it could be assembled. By her. She did this, created this new subject of the world. If it was a girl, she would know all this before her first words; if a boy—woe.

  In her apartment she thought of this, prescinding the strange changes stretching and swelling her flesh and mind for reflection. Maxwell probably suspected. In the mornings he would watch silently from the bathroom doorway as she vomited into the toilet. Yet he said nothing. Five weeks ago she’d brought home four new dresses, all larger than the ones in her closet. He remarked about their size, but took his questioning no further. But if he suspected, why was he silent? Had her confession reamed out his feelings long ago? What she’d done to him, or failed to feel, came dangerously close to bordering on sin. Tippis hadn’t mentioned the terrible rewards of taking another as one’s object—the growing dependence, the loss of one’s self-esteem. They had to be acknowledged; she lived with them every day; she saw the emptiness in Maxwell’s eyes, saw the way his interest shifted from her and his home to the office, to overtime and drinking with his bosses, not because he coveted a raise or a successful column but because he could not bear to be home with her for long. And now? Would her bearing the baby break him completely? Perhaps it would be better to lie after all. But she had done enough, or not done enough, to Maxwell already. He was only a man. . . .

  Seven-thirty.

  Faith began to worry. He should have arrived hours ago. It was possible that Jones, as disturbed as he was, had burst into The Sentry offices downtown and made a scene, had exposed Maxwell’s marital problems for all to hear and so infuriated Maxwell that they’d fought. Faith chain-smoked. If they’d fought, inside the building or outside in some garbage-strewn alley, or on the street before dozens of onlookers afraid to get involved—and it was likely since Maxwell stayed at sixes and sevens with everyone—then Jones would be arrested. He’d be sent back to prison. She’d be alone again.

  Faith forced her worries from her mind and walked to her bedroom window. She looked to the dark lake below, to the waves plashing against stark white rocks along the brown rolling beach. Two lovers strolled on the sand below, their fingers interlaced as they walked barefoot to sit on a large blanched rock. Things could work out all right if Maxwell released her. It would be better for him. She remembered the last time—months ago—when he’d knocked on her bedroom door at midnight, his shorts straining with an erection as hard as Space-Age plastic. She’d risen, leaning on her elbows, pitying him, beckoning him into the bedroom with the hope that—maybe—things would work out. He’d kissed her full in the mouth, slid into bed with his respirator, and tried to rouse her feelings. But as he touched her arm he seemed to remember painful things—their arguments, her confessions, and his tool shrank completely from the occasion. She could smell his sweat as he lay beside her, whining. “You don’t need me, I guess. You need somebody who can do you some good. I—” She’d pressed her lips to his, tasting the bitter fumes of his asthma spray, and he said, “Damn you,” whom he meant, he didn’t say; but he could hardly have meant his respirator. He cuddled up in her arms like a child, fell fast asleep, and not once during the night realized she had cried. He never approached her again. Not once. Faith lit another cigarette, certain that a break would be best for them. He could remarry someone more like himself, and she and Jones could return to Hatten County. They could rebuild her father’s farmhouse, throw up a byre, work the fields, raise the baby. Big Todd’s delicate dream of a bucolic life lived like a myth would not be lost, only deferred, not destroyed, but finally realized in her and the boy who had his favor. She swore to that, and decided to name the baby after Todd.

  Before she could turn the sound of Todd Jones over on her tongue, she heard a key in the door. It grated against the metal lock for a long time, like a cat or a demon trying to break in. It startled her; she imagined some long-dead thing covered with seaweed and brine, rising with blood-red foam from the floor of the lake, dragging its scaly form along the sand to the entrance of the building below, then slowly scaling the steps, oozing through the quiet hallway with a leer on its hideous three heads to claw at her door, burst in, and pluck her heart from her breast. The noise stopped. She heard a pounding on the door and wall outside.

  “Open the goddamn door for Christ’s sake!”

  By the time Faith reached the door she was out of breath; already the baby was stealing her wind. She threw open the latch, and Maxwell fell in, his head pitching forward. She caught him, coughed at the sickly sweet smell of whisky on his breath, and helped him to the davenport in the front room. Maxwell’s head rolled back and forth on the back of the davenport—his mouth hung open, and his eyes were woven with red and blue veins of blood. His limbs seemed boneless. He leaned forward and tried to focus on her as she bit her nails. A chill ran up her spine as she imagined the course of his thoughts across the background of cocoa-colored walls, rug, and delphiniumblue draperies to the foreground where she stood, resting her hand on a straight-back chair, no more important to him than the cold furniture itself. They were obstacles to the tired tread of his feet across the room, even as she obstructed his progress through. . . . She held her breath. Waiting.

  “Your boyfriend quit today!” he shouted in a whisky tenor.

  She nibbled her fingernail, bit her forefinger, and winced, watching it bleed.

  “Did you hear me?” Maxwell said. “Jones came in today at closing time and said he wasn’t gonna work on the goddamn column no more!” He held out the fingers on both his hands and spread them as he pursed his lips. “Pffft! Just like that. He walked out on me. . . .”

  She could hear her own heart hammering, as loud as a voodoo drum in a New Orleans swamp. It hurt her chest. Faith sat down on the chair to her left, holding her head. “What did he say?”

  “He said he quit, that’s what he said.” Maxwell’s mouth twisted clear across his face. “He said he was leaving town to take a goddamn job as a goddamn illustrator for a goddamn ad firm in New York City.”

  Something slapped her stomach, from the inside. Please stop swearing, she thought. She bent forward, felt her head swim, and tottered to the bathroom where she jackknifed, vomiting into the bowl. Too weak to rise, she heard Maxwell’s voice behind her.

  “What do you think of that?” he said. “After all I did for him—”

  There was a great claw flexing around her heart, crushing her insides. She dry-heaved, and this time she brought up black clots of blood. Maxwell dropped to her side, catching her around her waist before she fell forward. He carried her in his arms back to the bedroom, drew back the covers, and dropped her on the bed.

  “I’m going to call a doctor,” he said. He wagged his finger at her. “Uh huhn—I don’t want to hear it! You’re sick.”

  Faith sat up, shivering now. Sweating. He didn’t know. He still, perhaps, loved her. There was still time.

  Now.

  “Honey,” she said weakly, aware that her voice was hoarse, “come here.” She had not called him that in months, not since his last visit to her bedroom. He froze in the doorway, his face full of doubt. “Come closer,” she whispered, horrified by the hollow echo in her voice. Maxwell sat down on the bed beside her, his hands hanging heavy between his knees, his eyes vacant.

  “We’re going to have a baby. . . .”

  The voice of the dead living was behind Maxwell’s reply, a voice that has no mind, no sense, no emotion directing it. The larynx and vocal cords sound like taut strings wired in a small box located in the throat of a ventriloquist’s dummy; the sounds grate from the lips like chalk scraping a blackboard, severed from thought: “A baby . . .” His mouth shut with a snap.

  All the air in her bedroom rushed to a single corner, far, far away from them. She heard a wheeze, a rattle deep in his throat. “We?”

  She wanted to lie down. To wrap herself with the s
heets, or in a shroud of dry forest leaves. To sleep.

  Thought returned to Maxwell, coloring his words like blood slowly staining cloth. “We’re—we?—are going to . . .” He sucked in his breath violently and stood over her, his palms pressed against his chest, his shirt collar, his legs stiff and head pushed forward. “We’re going to have a baby!”

  Do something, she thought. Why was it taking so long to sink in? She had to wait, motionless, for his move. It came. Like retribution, destiny, or a curse it came. Before her eyes his expression glided through a rosary of emotions—bemusement, suppressed rage—like a mime gone mad. The muscles around his mouth hardened; they stood out like tiny tumors burgeoning beneath his skin.

  His voice grunted, sobbing from syllable to syllable. “You must think I’m a fool!” He tottered away from her bed, suddenly sober and choking for air. He searched his pockets for his respirator but only came up with lint. Maxwell swayed for a moment, snatched off his wig, and threw it to the floor. He whirled toward her. “We are going to have a baby?” he screamed. “Baby, we aren’t going to have anything! I can’t even—” Maxwell closed his eyes and fought for breath; he turned from her on his heels and drove the flat of his fist against the wall. Once. Plaster rained from the ceiling to the floor. He looked at the gray shards from the ceiling scattered at his feet, and his face went slack. He looked at her, and she could hear him thinking, Look what I did. He seemed to be in control again. Said, “Bitch!” barely under his breath to define her, to frame her for the assault building in his mind. She could see his lips trembling under the exercise of his Will Power, his desire to not say a single word until he had thought it through. Then his face changed. He drew his lips back over his teeth, he narrowed his eyes at her, the wings of his nose went open, and his right hand rose, pointing a forefinger at her head like a pistol.

  “Let me tell you something! I tried to play it straight from the first day I met you—I didn’t ask any questions when it looked like you didn’t want to give me an answer, but I told you everything about me. Didn’t I?” He was shaking, remembering things he had said to her about his childhood, remembering his confidence. “Shit!” he swore to snap himself back. “I trusted you; I didn’t think you’d lie to me, and even if I did catch you in a lie I thought you were doing it for my own good—our good—to keep us together. Even that insanity about the Good Thing, and the time you spent hustling in that goddamn hotel—it was all okay.” Maxwell wiped away water from his eyes; he clenched his fists for control. “If you loved me I figured it was okay if you lied. And afterward I was glad that you told me . . . even though I didn’t know how to act anymore. I didn’t know how to get next to you—to make you feel something for me. I thought buying you the car might do it. Or maybe if I could turn you on in bed—” He stopped, looking away, ashamed. “Maybe I was stupid—I’ve got less feeling than you, isn’t that the way you put it one time, less feeling and faith. I ain’t in tune with the universe! Well, I had some kinda faith, all right, because I believed in you, Faith! I lay there on that goddamn davenport in the living room night after night, believing that you’d make the next move, the right move—that you’d come in there and show me what I needed to do to keep us together.” Maxwell bent forward, wringing his hands. “Do you understand?—you meant so much to me that I kept quiet when I saw you messing with that—that—that—boy! Yeah, I knew, but you meant . . . that much . . . to me—”