Kim Hunter - The Official Report on Human Activity

Tyrone had smiled as if he had just closed his mouth over the last sweet crust of peach cobbler.

“That’s one of those songs,” he’d said.

Rick look at him expectantly.

“He means,” Schwartz spoke up, “it’s code, not really a love song.”

“Robert Johnson was the master of that, baby!” Tyrone said beaming. “All those songs about the Devil, and stuff like “Hellhound on my Trail.” If you told the straight truth back then, you didn’t shame the Devil, you called him out of his lair followed by the lynch mob.”

“Oh yes,” Schwartz said, rolling her eyes, “I’m sure the Marvelettes were really singing about turning the tables on the White Citizens’ Councils.”

Rick had gone to the bathroom after several cups of tea and walked out with a copy of Native Son he found on the shelf with stacks of toilet paper, anti-war protest flyers, and paperback copies of Hamlet and Ellison’s Invisible Man.

“You like the bleak stuff?” Tyrone said, nodding at the Wright novel.

“Hamlet is bleak too, no conflict, no motivation,” Rick replied.

“No motivation! You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” Tyrone smirked.

“I know it’s only people who’ve got their behinds on pillows with nothing better to do who sit around wondering whether life is worth living. Everyone else is too busy trying to live.”

A mocking laugh almost caused Schwartz to spit out her tea. “Tyrone used to say the same thing,” she said, looking directly at him, “until I showed him all the father figures in the play.”

“Yeah,” Tyrone agreed grudgingly. “It’s not ‘to be or not to be.’ It’s about who’s your daddy, the dead father, the usurper king…”

“Laertes,” Rick added, suddenly coming to a realization.

Essentially, there was no third visit to Tyrone and Schwartz’s even though Rick came prepared with a list of books and literary questions to discuss. He’d put that in his pocket. In his wallet, he’d folded the start of a love letter. He’d dreamt he was home with Schwartz on Belle Isle on a blanket beneath a tree, eating fruit as she sang.

The reality check came when he was a block away from their place. Two black “unmarked” police cars were parked in front. He crossed the street and decided to observe discreetly. Closer, he saw Schwartz at the door talking to two beefy white, uniformed cops and two more in plain clothes. He walked by, fighting the urge to look directly at them. Resisting that urge fell in line with everything Rick had learned about how to act when the police stop you, what to watch for, down to whether or not the small strip of leather over the butt of the holstered gun was snapped or unsnapped, readied.

“Never, ever look at the gun until the cop is looking at your ID,” he heard Andre’s voice in his head.

He turned to see what was happening when he thought he heard Schwartz’s voice catch and release in what sounded like a sob.

It was near night when the police finally tired of Schwartz’s silence and decided to let her leave the precinct. Besides, they felt they had her brother cold and he was their target. She left the police station but was not free. She felt tied to the jail as if she was evacuating a disaster leaving her brother behind. She would have to call her mother, after all this time, with bad news. She wished it was later, that sleep would come sooner, that the city night would deliver stars as intoxicating as the ones she’d seen in Virginia. At the same time, she wished she’d never set foot in the woods near the cabin.

Schwartz had never thought of paradise as having night until she’d spent a few evenings with her new lover out in the open, staring at the sky. She didn’t know or care about the constellations like he did, but she loved to hear him talk about what he called “signs of heaven,” his voice cool and colorless as the stream. He was plain spoken and smiled at the slightest provocation, red bow lips on pale skin. The stars they shared were static fireworks, a painting of white Christmas bulbs flung out on endless black. He was happy to show her what he kept calling “the real sky,” away from the city.

He had first seen her walking in and out of sunlight by a nameless creek beneath a stand of trees in unnaturally straight rows, river birches with their ever-peeling, cinnamon-red barks with dull orange undersides that reminded him of sunburn-flaked skin. Her walk was aimless. He couldn’t tell if she was bored or amused. She wasn’t local. She may not have been from Virginia at all. That made her beauty all the more exotic. He had once seen a Swedish actress on the cover of a magazine with lips as thick as hers. She was not quite as pale as the actress but her amazingly curly hair was just as gold.

Her mother had rented an isolated cabin for the week. Her brother was supposed to join them for the long weekend when he could get off work. They had all planned to do nothing but read during the day and talk about what they read when it got dark. The cabin had no electricity. The brother was late.

When Schwartz finally introduced the young man she had met in the woods to her mother, she looked at him with a curious smile. Schwartz recognized the expression from when she was young and had presented her mother with a drawing or homemade gift that her mother couldn’t quite make out. The mother wondered if Schwartz and the young man were lovers or would become lovers. Though the lovers knew the answer, they didn’t know a child was coming.

Tyrone had been in a panic because he’d delayed his reading assignment and subsequent paper due the Wednesday after the long weekend. He’d gotten off work early and thought he would just scan the book to get a feel for it but, to his surprise, Paradise Lost was a page turner, from the psychedelic fire of creation to the unexpectedly nuanced and tortured Satan, a sort of cosmic film noir protagonist. Eve had just arrived on the scene when Tyrone noticed the sun was low and realized he was supposed to have been on the road to the cabin some time ago.

He had to stop reading. It felt unnatural for him to leave the world he’d entered, as if something had been pulled out of socket, dislocated. The purple clouds on the horizon, magnificent as they were, loomed as sudden threats. He hadn’t finished packing. He was supposed to have asked the man down the street about the rattling noise in the car’s gearbox.

The last thing he’d wanted was to try to find the cabin in the dark, but it was almost two am when he arrived. He slept in while Schwartz and his mother fixed breakfast and read. He awoke groggily, ate cold eggs, and eventually learned that Schwartz had a new boyfriend. He laughed sardonically at the discovery.

“There’s another black family out here?” he asked half rhetorically.

The mother sighed. Earlier, she’d almost been happy that Tyrone was late, that he hadn’t been there when Schwartz had brought the young man to the cabin. It had allowed her another day to avoid the issue or think there might be a time when she could bring it up with Schwartz before Tyrone’s arrival. Would things have been more difficult but somehow simpler if her darker child had been present when Schwartz’s young man was introduced? Would the young white man have filled in the gaps?

“Honey, your brother’s got a point. Did you tell the young man? You know what he probably thinks. Seeing me didn’t help any.”

“How do you know he even cares about it, that it even matters?”

“A white boy, in Virginia no less, who doesn’t care about race?” Tyrone said incredulously. “Be for real.”

Schwartz dropped her book and walked swiftly out of the cabin into the woods.