The Trouble With Eden - Lawrence Block [86]
Jeff.
The black boy.
Man, he supposed he meant. Only Caucasians could be referred to as boys. At what age, he wondered, did blacks bridle at being called boy?
The same afternoon he was in the living room reading a magazine. He looked up when the front door opened. She bounced into the room, asking if she was interrupting. He told her she wasn’t.
“Untrue,” she said, gaily. She dropped into his lap like a child and memories clutched at his heart. “Of course I’m interrupting. What I meant was do you mind awfully?”
“I do not mind a bit.”
“Good. What were you reading?”
“Article about blood banks. Commercial blood banks.”
“What’s there to say about commercial blood banks besides yecchhh?”
“That’s about what the article said. How drunks and junkies sell their blood and it spreads hepatitis and other unpleasant things.”
“And that’s what you were reading? I don’t think I feel at all guilty for interrupting. Actually I have an ulterior motive.”
“Oh?”
“See, it’s a beautiful day, I was thinking it would be fantastic to take a walk in the woods, but suppose there are bears there? I mean, I wouldn’t feel safe unless I had company.”
“I see.”
“And I’m sure you would never forgive yourself,” she said, “if I were eaten by a bear.”
“How well you know me. If you get up, then I could get up.”
“Deal.”
And in the special stillness of the woods, she said, “I was thinking about a habit I have. Of jumping to conclusions. The only way to avoid it is to come out and ask, isn’t it?”
“Ask what?”
“Well, you did have sex with Melanie, didn’t you?”
He started to laugh, then assured her that he did. A few steps farther she said, “I didn’t.”
“Oh?”
“With Jeff. What you didn’t do with Linda, I didn’t do with Jeff.” She turned from him, bent to pick up a dead branch. She straightened up and punctuated her speech with little slaps of the branch into the palm of her hand. “By the time we got upstairs I realized what I was doing. I mean I realized all along in a way but I didn’t see how rotten it was. I was doing a number.”
“We’ve both been feeling each other out a lot, kitten.”
“But this really sucked. It was like I was saying, ‘I’m testing you by bringing home a spade, and if you can handle this one, tomorrow I’ll bring home a kangaroo.’ And I was using Jeff. I wasn’t even using him as a person, I was using him as a spade. Which is a racist thing.”
“Well—”
“It is. I was trying to show that you were a racist, or that you weren’t or … fuck it, I don’t know what I was trying to prove, I honestly don’t. But I was into a racist thing myself in doing it.” She slapped the branch harder against her palm and it snapped. She stared at the piece still in her hand, then opened her hand and watched it fall.
She said, “I wonder if he knew what I was doing. He didn’t say anything but he must have picked up on it. Maybe he didn’t care. You know, anything to get laid. Do men really have that attitude?”
“Some of the time. Most of the time, maybe. More than women, certainly.”
“That’s kind of depressing, that he could see what I was doing and still want to ball me. But when I saw, I don’t know, I just couldn’t do it. I don’t know what it was exactly but I couldn’t. I knew I had to get out of it without being horrible. I told him—what was it I said? I told him I couldn’t do anything with you in the house, that it just made me clutch completely. He wanted me to go somewhere else but I wouldn’t.” She stared at him suddenly. “I wonder if I told him the truth without meaning to! Maybe I was uptight about that without knowing it.”
“It’s possible.”
“I just thought of that. What I thought after he left was that maybe I was a racist in another way, that once we were upstairs there I was all alone with this black guy and I couldn’t go through with balling him because he was black. I never made it with a black person before. It’s so hard to know why you do things and what’s good