You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down_ Stories - Alice Walker [37]
We would continue to have an “international list” of lovers whose amorous talents or lack of talents we would continue (giggling into our dotage) to compare. Our friendship would survive everything, be truer than everything, endure even our respective marriages, children, husbands—assuming we did, out of desperation and boredom someday, marry, which did not seem a probability, exactly, but more in the area of an amusing idea.
But now there was a cooling off of our affection for each other. Luna was becoming mildly interested in drugs, because everyone we knew was. I was envious of the open-endedness of her life. The financial backing to it. When she left her job at the kindergarten because she was tired of working, her errant father immediately materialized. He took her to dine on scampi at an expensive restaurant, scolded her for living on East 9th Street, and looked at me as if to say: “Living in a slum of this magnitude must surely have been your idea.” As a cullud, of course.
For me there was the Welfare Department every day, attempting to get the necessary food and shelter to people who would always live amid the dirty streets I knew I must soon leave. I was, after all, a Sarah Lawrence girl “with talent.” It would be absurd to rot away in a building that had no front door.
I slept late one Sunday morning with a painter I had met at the Welfare Department. A man who looked for all the world like Gene Autry, the singing cowboy, but who painted wonderful surrealist pictures of birds and ghouls and fruit with teeth. The night before, three of us—me, the painter, and “an old Navy buddy” who looked like his twin and who had just arrived in town—had got high on wine and grass.
That morning the Navy buddy snored outside the bedrooms like a puppy waiting for its master. Luna got up early, made an immense racket getting breakfast, scowled at me as I emerged from my room, and left the apartment, slamming the door so hard she damaged the lock. (Luna had made it a rule to date black men almost exclusively. My insistence on dating, as she termed it, “anyone” was incomprehensible to her, since in a politically diseased society to “sleep with the enemy” was to become “infected” with the enemy’s “political germs.” There is more than a grain of truth in this, of course, but I was having too much fun to stare at it for long. Still, coming from Luna it was amusing, since she never took into account the risk her own black lovers ran by sleeping with “the white woman,” and she had apparently been convinced that a summer of relatively innocuous political work in the South had cured her of any racial, economic, or sexual political disease.)
Luna never told me what irked her so that Sunday morning, yet I remember it as the end of our relationship. It was not, as I at first feared, that she thought my bringing the two men to the apartment was inconsiderate. The way we lived allowed us to be inconsiderate from time to time. Our friends were varied, vital, and often strange. Her friends especially were deeper than they should have been into drugs.
The distance between us continued to grow. She talked more of going to Goa. My guilt over my dissolute if pleasurable existence coupled with my mounting hatred of welfare work, propelled me in two directions: south and to West Africa. When the time came to choose, I discovered that my summer in the South had infected me with the need to return, to try to understand, and write about, the people I’d merely lived with before.
We never discussed the rape again. We never discussed, really, Freddie Pye or Luna’s remaining feelings about what had happened. One night, the last month we lived together, I noticed a man’s blue denim jacket thrown across the church pew. The next morning, out of Luna’s bedroom walked Freddie Pye. He barely spoke to me—possibly because as a black woman I was expected to be hostile toward his presence in a white woman’s bedroom. I was too surprised to exhibit hostility, however, which was only a part of what I felt,