You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down_ Stories - Alice Walker [42]
A veritable movie.
Throughout the rest of the week we racked our brains trying to think of a place to make love. But the hotels were still segregated, and once, after a Movement party at somebody’s house, we were severely reprimanded for walking out into the Southern night, blissfully hand in hand.
“Don’t you know this is outrageous?” a young black man asked us, pulling us into his car, where I sat on Laurel’s lap in a kind of sensual stupor—hearing his words, agreeing with them, knowing the bloody History behind them…but not caring in the least.
In short, there was no place for us to make love, as that term is popularly understood. We were housed in dormitories. Men in one. Women in another. Interracial couples were under surveillance wherever the poor things raised their heads anywhere in the city. We were reduced to a kind of sexual acrobatics on a bench close beside one of the dormitories. And, as lovers know, acrobatics of a sexual sort puts a strain on one’s powers of physical ingenuity while making one’s lust all the more a resident of the brain, where it quickly becomes all-pervading, insatiable, and profound.
The state of lust itself is not a happy one if there is no relief in sight. Though I am happy enough to enter that state whenever it occurs, I have learned to acknowledge its many and often devastating limitations. For example, the most monumental issues fade from one’s consciousness as if erased by a swift wind. Movements of great social and political significance seem but backdrops to one’s daily exchanges—be they ever so muted and circumscribed—with the Object of One’s Desire. (I at least was not yet able to articulate how the personal is the political, as was certainly true in Laurel’s and my case. Viz., nobody wanted us to go to bed with each other, except us, and they had made laws to that effect. And of course whether we slept together or not was nobody’s business, except ours.)
The more it became impossible to be with Laurel, to make love fully and naturally, the more I wanted nothing but that. If the South had risen again during one of our stolen kisses—his hands on my breasts, my hands on his (his breasts were sensitive, we discovered quite by acrobatic invention and accident)—we would have been hard pressed to notice. This is “criminal” to write, of course, given the myths that supposedly make multiracial living so much easier to bear, but it is quite true. And yet, after our week together—passionate, beautiful, haunting, and never, never to be approximated between us again, our desire to make love never to be fulfilled (though we did not know this then)—we went our separate ways. Because in fact, while we kissed and said Everything Else Be Damned! the South was rising again. Was murdering people. Was imprisoning our colleagues and friends. Was keeping us from strolling off to a clean, cheap hotel.
It was during our last night together that he told me about his wife. We were dancing in a local Movement-oriented nightclub. What would today be called a disco. He had an endearing way of dancing, even to slow tunes (during which we clung together shamelessly); he did a sort of hop, fast or slow depending on the music, from one foot to the other, almost in time with the music—and that was dance to him. It didn’t bother me at all. Our bodies easily found their own rhythms anyway, and touching alone was our reason for being on the floor. There we could make a sort of love, in a dark enough corner, that was not exactly grace but was not, was definitely not, acrobatics.
He peered at me through the gray-and-blue-framed glasses.
“I’ve got a wife back home.”
What I’ve most resented as “the other woman” is being made responsible for the continued contentment and happiness of the wife. On our last night together, our lust undiminished and apparently not to be extinguished, given our surroundings, what was I supposed to do with this information?
All I could think was: She’s not my wife.
She