You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down_ Stories - Alice Walker [11]
She was away for two months at an artists’ colony in New England and that is where she met Ellis, whom she immediately dubbed, once she had got over thinking he resembled (with his top lip slightly raised over his right eyetooth when he smiled) a wolf, “The Lover.” They met one evening before dinner as she was busy ignoring the pompous bullshit of a fellow black poet, a man many years older than she who had no concept of other people’s impatience. He had been rambling on about himself for over an hour and she had at first respectfully listened because she was the kind of person whose adult behavior—in a situation like this—reflected her childhood instruction; and she was instructed as a child, to be polite.
She was always getting herself stuck in one-sided conversations of this sort because she was—the people who talked to her seemed to think—an excellent listener. She was, up to a point. She was genuinely interested in older artists in particular and would sit, entranced, as they spun out their tales of art and lust (the gossip, though old, was delicious!) of forty years ago.
But there had been only a few of these artists whose tales she had listened to until the end. For as soon as a note of bragging entered into the conversation—a famous name dropped here, an expensive Paris restaurant’s menu dropped there, and especially the names of the old artist’s neglected books and on what occasion the wretched creature had insulted this or that weasel of a white person—her mind began to turn about upon itself until it rolled out some of her own thoughts to take the place of the trash that was coming in.
And so it was on that evening before dinner. The old poet—whose work was exceedingly mediocre, and whose only attractions, as far as she was concerned, were his age and his rather bitter wit—fastened his black, bloodshot eyes upon her (in which she read desperation and a prayer of unstrenuous seduction) and held her to a close attention to his words. Except that she had perfected the trick—as had many of her contemporaries who hated to be rude and who, also, had a strong sense of self-preservation (because the old poet, though, she thought, approaching senility, was yet a powerful figure in black literary circles and thought nothing of using his considerable influence to thwart the careers of younger talents)—of keeping her face quite animated and turned full on to the speaker, while inside her head she could be trying out the shades of paint with which to improve the lighting of her house. In fact, so intense did her concentration appear, it seemed she read the speaker’s lips.
Ellis, who would be her lover, had come into the room and sat down on a chair by the fire. For although it was the middle of summer, a fire was needed against the chilly New England evenings.
“Have you been waiting long?” he asked.
And it suddenly occurred to her that indeed she had.
“But of course,” she answered absently, noting the crooked smile that reminded her of a snarling, though not disagreeable, wolf—and turned back just as the old poet jealously reached out his hand to draw her attention to the, for him, hilarious ending of his story. She laughed and slapped her knee, a gesture of such fraudulent folksiness that she was soon laughing in earnest. Catching Ellis’s eye as she thus amused herself she noticed therein a particular gleam that she instantly recognized.
“My lover,” she thought, noticing for the first time