“What you need is a woman who’s all sugar on the outside but firm as steel underneath, someone who will take you by the ear and save you from yourself. I’m going to introduce you to Carmen Morales,” Gregory Reeves told Timothy once he had resigned himself to loving Carmen like a brother, after realizing that she was beyond his reach.
“It’s too late, Greg. I’m not good for anything but whores,” Timothy Duane replied, for once without sarcasm.
Shannon blew into Reeves’s life like a breath of fresh air. He had been climbing the ladder for years but despite his successes felt he was not getting anywhere, like the feeling of running in a nightmare. With a magician’s legerdemain he was juggling debts, whirlwind trips, outrageous partying, an insane schedule, and a stable of women, with the sense, renewed every day, that at the slightest distraction everything would come tumbling down with earthquake force. He had more legal cases than he could manage, more debts than he could pay, and more lovers than he could satisfy. His good memory helped in remembering all the loose threads in that tangle; his good luck in not slipping into careless error; and his good health in not dying of exhaustion like an ox driven beyond endurance. Shannon arrived one Monday morning dressed in bridal white and smelling of flowers, with the sunniest smile ever seen in his firm’s steel-and-glass building. She was twenty-two years old, but her girlish mannerisms and winsome personality made her seem younger. It was her first job as a receptionist; previously she had worked as a clerk in several shops, as a waitress, and as an amateur singer, but as she said with the voice of a beguiling adolescent, there was no future in those jobs. Gregory, dazzled by her radiance and intrigued by the variety of jobs held by someone so young, asked her what advantages she saw in answering the telephone behind a marble desk, and she enigmatically replied that there she would at least meet the right people. Reeves at once wrote her name in his address book and before the week was out had asked her to go dancing. She accepted with the calm confidence of a lioness in repose. I like older men, she remarked with a smile. Reeves did not really know what to say, because he was used to going out with young girls and had not considered the difference in their ages to be significant. Soon he would confront the generational abyss that separated them, but by then it would be too late to turn back. Shannon was a girl of her time. Escaping a violent father and a mother who covered the marks of her husband’s beatings with makeup, she had set out on foot from the backwater Georgia town where she was born. A couple of miles out of town she hitched a ride with the first truck-driver who spotted her, a fantastic apparition standing by the endless ribbon of highway, and after miscellaneous adventures reached San Francisco. The combination of ingenuousness and self-confidence fascinated everyone who met her and helped her rise above sordid realities; doors flew open before her advance, and obstacles evaporated. The invitation in her verdant eyes disarmed women and seduced men. She gave the impression of being totally unaware of her power; she breezed through life like a celestial sprite, eternally surprised when everything turned out well. Her fickle nature caused her to flit from one situation to the next, always cheerful, with never a thought for the struggles and pain of other mortals. She did not concern herself about the present, much less the future. Through conscious amnesia, she suppressed the squalid scenes of her childhood, the poverty of adolescence, the betrayals of lovers who used her and left her, and the incontestable fact that she hadn’t a cent to her name. Incapable of keeping two pennies to rub together, she survived with briefly held jobs where she earned barely enough to live, but she did not think of herself as poor because whenever she wanted something, all she had to do was ask: a few enthralled suitors were always at hand, eager to satisfy her whims. She did not use men maliciously or perversely; it merely seemed to her that there was no other reason for their being. She was innocent of the pain of love or any other meaningful emotion. She was fleetingly enthusiastic about each new lover—as long as the newness lasted—but soon she tired of him and moved on, with no sympathy for the person she left behind. She was unaware that she damned several lovers to the martyrdom of jealousy and hopeless dejection, because she herself was impervious to that kind of suffering; if it was she who was abandoned, she changed course without a regret—after all, the world held an inexhaustible supply of available men. Two years after they met, while bandaging the knuckles he had bloodied punching one of her conquests in the face, Shannon told Gregory Reeves in all seriousness: You have to forgive me, you know; I’m like an artichoke: a leaf here, a leaf there, but the heart is for you. From their first date it was obvious who was the stronger. Reeves was defeated on his own turf; all his experience and arrogant Don Juaning were no help now. He fell for the new receptionist the minute he saw her, not just for her physical charms—he had known more than one as beautiful as she—but also for her ready laugh and evident candor. That night, with true concern, he asked himself what he might do to save that splendid creature: he imagined her exposed to all sorts of dangers and difficulties and took upon himself the responsibility for protecting her.
“Fate led her to me for some reason,” he told Carmen. “According to my father’s Infinite Plan, nothing happens by chance. This girl needs me.”
Carmen missed her opportunity to warn him because her intuitive antennae were tuned toward Dai; she was busily sewing him a costume to wear as one of the Three Wise Men in a Christmas play at school. With the telephone clamped between her ear and her shoulder, she was gluing feathers onto an emerald-colored turban before her son’s attentive eyes.
“I just hope this one’s not a vegetarian,” she commented distractedly.
She was not. Shannon savored her new lover’s culinary treats with contagious enthusiasm and insatiable appetite; it was truly miraculous that she could devour such quantities of food and still keep her figure. She could also drink like a sailor. With the second drink her eyes took on a feverish shine, as the angelic child was transformed into the sensual woman. At that stage, Reeves never knew which of the two personalities was more appealing: the artless receptionist in a starched white blouse who reported every Monday to sit behind the marble desk or Sunday’s stormy naked bacchante. She was a fascinating woman, and he the geographer charting new territories. They saw each other every day at work, where they feigned an indifference that was suspicious given one’s reputation as a womanizer and the other’s intrinsic flirtatiousness. Several nights a week they met in marathon encounters they confused with love, and even at the office they sometimes darted into a room, closed the door, and, ignoring the risk of being discovered, writhed and gyrated with adolescent urgency. Reeves was more in love than he had ever been, which may also have been true of Shannon—though in her case that was not saying much. Gregory began to relive that portion of his youth when the volcanic eruption of his hormones had sent him in hot pursuit of any girl who crossed his path, except that now all that charged passion was focused upon a single objective. He could not get Shannon out of his mind; he kept rising from his desk to look at her, even from a distance, tormented by jealousy of men in general and his officemates in particular, including the old man of the orchids, who also made frequent stops at the young receptionist’s desk, tempted perhaps by the thought of one last trophy but arrested by his sense of the ridiculous and his awareness of the limitations of age. No one passed through the reception area without being struck by the lightning of Shannon’s dazzling smile. If she was not free to go out in the evening, Gregory Reeves inevitably imagined her in another’s arms, and the mere suspicion set him mad. He showered her with absurd presents, hoping to impress her, unaware that she did not appreciate hand-painted Russian boxes, bonsai trees, or pearls for her ears but would have preferred a pair of leather jeans to wear with biker friends her age. With a lover’s passion to share everything with the beloved, he tried to warm her to his interests. When he took her to the opera she was fascinated with the audience’s elegant clothes, but when the curtain rose she thought they were watching a farce. She contained herself unt
il the third act, but when the fat woman dressed as a geisha plunged a knife into her own belly while her son waved a Japanese flag in one hand and an American flag in the other, her laughter roared above the orchestra and they had to flee the hall.
In August Gregory took Shannon to Italy. She had worked for the firm for less than a year and was not entitled to vacation time, but that created no problem since she had handed in her resignation, to take a job with a modeling agency. Gregory spent the trip suffering in anticipation; he hated the idea of seeing her exposed to everyone’s eyes in the pages of a magazine but did not dare voice his concern for fear of appearing hopelessly old-fashioned. He also refrained from mentioning his objections to Carmen, because he knew she would rib him unmercifully. As he walked down a flower-lined path on the shores of Lake Como, blinded by Shannon’s incomparable charms to the misty mirror of the water and the ocher-toned villas clinging to the hillsides, it occurred to him how he might keep her by his side. He proposed that if Shannon came to live with him she would not have to work and could enroll in the university to study for a career. She was intelligent and creative; wasn’t there something she would like to study? No, not at the moment, Shannon replied, with the easy laugh that came after several glasses of wine, but she would think of something. That night Reeves picked up the telephone to tell Carmen, on the other side of the ocean, his news, but could not reach her. She and Dai had left on a trip to the Far East.
Bel Benedict did not know her exact age, nor did she want to find out. The years had slightly rusted her bones and darkened her burnt-sugar skin to a tone nearer chocolate, but nothing had altered the topaz glitter of her wide eyes or entirely quenched the fires in her loins. Some nights she dreamed hotly of the only man she had loved in her life and waked moist with pleasure. I must be the only randy old woman in history—sweet Jesus, forgive me, she thought, secretly more prideful than ashamed. Shame is what she felt when she looked in the mirror and saw that the body once sleek as a young mare’s now sagged like an old nag’s; if my husband could see me now, she thought, he’d be frightened away. She never rationalized that were he alive, he too would have suffered the passing of the years and not be the lithe, joyful, and lusty man who had seduced her when she was fifteen. But Bel could neither allow herself the luxury of lying in bed remembering the past nor stand before the mirror lamenting her decline; every morning she rose at dawn to go to work, except on Sundays, when she went to church and to market. During the last year she had not had a spare minute, because when she finished work she had to hurry home and look after her son. She had started calling him Baby again, as she had when she held him to her breast and sang him lullabies. Don’t call me that, Mama, my friends will tease me, he protested, but in fact he no longer had any friends; he had lost them all, along with his job, his wife, his children, and his memory. Poor Baby, Bel Benedict sighed, but she did not feel sorry for him; she actually envied him a little. She did not intend to die for many years to come, and as long as she was alive he would be safe. Step by step, one day at a time, was her philosophy; it was no good worrying about a tomorrow that might never come. Her grandfather, a Mississippi slave, had told her that we have our past before us: the past’s the only real thing we have, and we can learn a lot about living from it. The present is nothing but an illusion; as fast as you blink your eye it’s already part of the past. And the future? The future’s a dark hole no one can see; it may not even be there, because while we’re talking, death can come and carry us away. Bel had worked for Timothy’s parents so many years that it was difficult to imagine the house without her. When she was hired, she was already a woman of legend, one of those narrow-waisted black women who move as if they are swimming underwater.
“Marry me,” Timothy would say in the kitchen when she treated him to pancakes, her one skill in cooking. “You’re so beautiful you should be a movie star instead of my mother’s maid.”
“The only blacks in the movies are whites in blackface,” she would say, laughing.
When she was very young, a black vagabond with an uproarious laugh had wandered down the road looking for a patch of shade where he could sit and rest. They had fallen in love at first sight, with a passion so torrid it could alter the weather and change the course of time. That love engendered King Benedict, who was to live two lives, just as Olga had foretold that day during the Second World War when the truck bearing the sign of The Infinite Plan had picked him up on a dusty country road. A few days after King was born, Bel had forgotten the nine months of carrying her son’s weight beneath her heart and the anguish of giving birth and was again chasing her man around every corner of the farm. They made love in a pool of blood beside the cows in the stable, the birds in the cornfields, and the scorpions in the barn. When the young King began to take his first hesitant steps, his father, exhausted by love and fearful of losing his soul and his manhood between the legs of that insatiable voluptuary, ran off, taking as a souvenir a lock of Bel’s hair, cut while she slept. In the turbulence of their rutting, Bel had turned a deaf ear to the insistence of the pastor of the Baptist church that they contract holy matrimony in the eyes of the Lord. For Bel, a signature in the church records had little bearing; she considered herself married. For the rest of her life, she used her lover’s name and told the many men who sought repose in her bosom that her husband was out of town on a trip. She said it so many times that she came to believe it, which was why she was enraged when she saw herself naked: If you don’t hurry back you’re not going to find nothing but a bag of bones, she scolded the memory of her absent lover.
One January morning half a century later, when the city was swept by a strong wind from the sea, Bel Benedict put on her turquoise-colored dress, hat, shoes, and gloves, her Sunday and party best. She had noticed that Queen Elizabeth always wore a monotone ensemble and could not rest until she had a similar outfit. Timothy Duane was waiting for her in front of the modest building where she lived.
“You won’t live forever, Bel. What will happen to your son when you’re gone?” Timothy had asked.
“King won’t be the first fourteen-year-old boy who has to make it on his own.”
“But he isn’t fourteen; he’s fifty-three.”
“For all practical purposes, he’s fourteen.”
“That’s just what I mean. He’ll always be a kid.”
“Maybe not; maybe he’ll grow up. . . .”
“If you had some money put aside, things would be a little easier. Don’t be stubborn, woman.”
“I’ve already told you, Tim. There’s nothing I can do. The lawyer for the insurance company told us straight out that we don’t have a claim. Just to be nice, they’re going to give us ten thousand dollars. But not yet; there’s lots of papers to fill out.”
“I don’t understand these things, but I have a friend who can give us good advice.”
Gregory Reeves welcomed them in the jungle of greenery in his office. Bel made her triumphal entry, dressed like a queen, sat on the long-suffering leather sofa, and proceeded to tell the strange story of her son, King Benedict. Reeves listened attentively, while he searched his infallible memory for the source of that name, which resonated with a distant echo of the past. It’s impossible to forget a name like that; I wonder where it was I heard it. King was a good Christian, the woman was saying, but God has not granted him an easy life. They had always been poor, and in the early years they had moved from place to place as she looked for work, bidding new friends goodbye and putting King in yet another school. He had grown up fearing that his mother might run off with one of her boyfriends and leave him alone in a room in some nameless town. He was a melancholy, shy boy, and two years of the war in the South Pacific had not helped erase his insecurity. After the war he married, had two children, and earned a living as a construction worker. Then his marriage went bad, his wife threatened to leave him, and his own children felt sorry for him. Bel noticed that he was tense and sad, and she was afraid he would begin drinking again, as he had in
previous crises; things went from bad to worse and finally culminated in his accident. He had been working at the second-story level, when the scaffolding collapsed and he fell to the ground. The shock knocked him out for a few seconds, but he got to his feet, apparently with only a few bruises. As a precaution, he was taken to the hospital but dismissed after a routine examination. As soon as his headache passed, however, and he began to speak, it was obvious that he did not recognize his family or know where he was; he thought he was a teenager again. His mother soon ascertained that his memory stopped at the age of fourteen; from that year on there was a void as deep as the ocean. He was given every test known and questioned for weeks; his orifices were probed, his brain was wired, he was hypnotized and X-rayed down to his soul—all without a logical reason being discovered for such a dramatic memory loss. Medical science could detect no physical trauma. King began to act like a manipulative child, inventing clumsy lies to trick his children—whom he treated like playmates—and to evade the watchful eye of his wife—whom he confused with his mother. He did not recognize Bel Benedict because he remembered her as a young and beautiful woman. Stranger that she was, however, he clung to that old woman like a limpet; she was his only security in a world of confusion. Relatives and friends doubted his amnesia; they thought it might be hysteria and soon tired of prying into the corners of his mind for a sign of recognition. The insurance company, too, was unconvinced; they suspected that King was perpetrating a hoax to collect disability; in their eyes he was a charlatan who would spend the rest of his life drawing an invalid’s pension for a bump on the head. Every time his wife left the house, King felt abandoned, and when she started bringing her lover to the house to spend the night, Bel Benedict decided the moment had come to intervene and took her son home to live with her. For months she had carefully observed him without detecting the slightest thread of memory following his fourteenth year. Gradually King had settled down; he was good company, and his mother was happy to have him with her. The only irrational aspect of his behavior was that he claimed to hear voices and see angels; although the doctors discounted them entirely, mother and son became accustomed to the presence of the phantoms of his imagination. Timothy Duane had brought copies of the hospital records and letters from the insurance company lawyers. Reeves barely glanced at them, feeling the familiar fire of battle race through him, the street fighter’s fervent anticipation, the thing he liked best about his profession: he thrived on complicated cases, difficult challenges, the actual skirmishes.