Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas - Maya Angelou [78]
“Oh, no, Mr. Julian. Please. I beg you. Don't send me your heart.”
Martha said, “Tell him to send you his tongue so he'll shut up.”
“Mistress Maya. It is that I am sending it to your theater, by hand, this morning. Good-bye, lovely legs leaping.” The line went dead.
Martha flopped back on the bed. “Well, thank God for small favors.”
Ethel looked at me, waiting to see if I wanted to talk about the phone call.
I said, “I'm going to take a bath.”
She said, “O.K. See you,” and wiggled down under the heavy quilts.
I was tickled and frightened. “It's I am being Mr. Julian,” indeed. He sounded old and rusty—like aged garden furniture, pushed around on concrete. “It's that I'm loving you. I am sending you my heart.” Oh no, please.
I walked down the hall to the communal bathroom, thinking about a gory heart wrapped in newspapers waiting in my dressing room.
I stood in the drafty tub sudsing myself and imagined the blood congealed, clotted around the aorta, I dried with the thin towel and assured myself that no one in the world, even in fiction, had ever cut out his own heart. Then I remembered hara-kiri, or the ritual Japanese samurai suicide where the protagonist arranges for friends to help him perform his self-murder. Were the Yugoslavs as dramatic? I prayed not.
Martha and Ethel woke as I was leaving to go downstairs for breakfast.
“Going to meet Mr. Julian, Maya? Going to bring back his heart?”
“I am going to breakfast, ladies. Just breakfast.”
“Don't eat braised heart on toast, girl.” I could have wrung Martha's silver throat. My appetite fled on the heels of her remark. Downstairs I forced down tea and continually pushed away the bloody pictures which assailed my mind. I couldn't go to the theater early because we were under the same restriction in Belgrade that had obtained in Zagreb. We could walk only in the prescribed four-block area, and buses took us to and from the theater.
I waited throughout the day. Drinking slivovitz and writing letters, forced happy letters, to my family.
Finally, the cast assembled in the lobby and we trooped onto the buses and were driven to the theater.
“Maya, there's something in the dressing room for you.”
He did it. The poor bastard. Actually cut out his heart and had it sent to me. I kept my face serene, but my body trembled and the muscles in my stomach were in revolt.
I opened the room door, half braced to see a bloody organ still thumping like a prop in the Bride of Frankenstein. A harmless-looking flat package wrapped in gay paper lay on my dressing table. If it was a heart, it had been sliced sliver-thin. I closed the door for privacy and picked up the box. It might have been a See's box of Valentine candies. The note read: “Mistress Maya, here is my heart. I am loving you. I am wishing to see you. Goodbye, my lovely legs. Mr. Julian.”
He had to be alive. Otherwise how could he hope to see me? I unwrapped the paper carefully because I might need it again. I pulled the last layer away.
Mr. Julian's heart was a cake. An inedible concoction of flour dough, water and probably concrete. It was a quarter of an inch thick and a little tanner than uncooked biscuit dough. A wisp of paper warned in Serbo-Croatian and French, “DO NOT EAT!” I inspected the thing and decided the warning was entirely unnecessary. Bits of plate glass and small squares of windows were punched down into the cake and there were shreds of paper doilies and tatters of lace which vied for space with dead leaves and dried flowers. The whole thing was sprinkled over with grains of rice, barley and wheat which were glued to the surface.
I swayed somewhere between relief and indignation. At least I didn't have the onus of trying to explain