Уолтер Мосли - Odyssey

“I don’t pay her for that,” he said.

For entertainment the duo traded off interests. He took her to movies that she wanted to see and in turn she agreed to go to plays and one opera that interested him.

“Did that bore you to death?” he’d ask her after a play or musical, opera, and once a speech by a black public intellectual on the inversion of racism.

“It was interesting,” she would say without fail.

The movies she liked were comedies and she never asked what he thought about them. But if she had asked he would have told her that he loved the way she laughed and giggled at the jokes and situations that writers and directors made up to distract her. And if she had gone further to ask, “Distracted from what?” he would have said, “From the ugliness of our lives on these streets and in the work we have to do to maintain that ugliness.”

But even this was not really true. He just loved to hear her laugh, touching his forearm now and again when something was exceptionally funny to her.

One day, in the middle of a comedy called Making Her Over , Sovereign leaned toward her and said, “You have been a godsend for me, Toni. You’ve made this darkness bearable.”

For long minutes after this confession Toni made no sounds of laughter. Sovereign felt that maybe she was moved by what he’d said.

One Tuesday, thirteen weeks into Sovereign James’s blindness, Toni had asked if they could stay in and have pizza instead of their usual busy schedule.

“It’s rainin’ outside,” she said, “and anyway I’m just tired.”

“Not sleeping?” Sovereign asked.

“Naw, I mean, yeah, I’m sleepin’ all right. It’s just that I want a pizza an’ maybe watch some TV. Could we?”

“Sure. I haven’t turned the television on in months but we can watch if you want.”

The pizza came but Toni didn’t turn on the television. They sat side by side on the white sofa, under the noonday sun. She served him his sausage-and-mushroom slices on a paper plate and wiped his chin twice when grease dripped down it.

She was exceptionally quiet. Sovereign knew from experience that this meant she had something to say. Toni’s need to say anything serious was always preceded by an almost profound silence. He could tell by the way she phrased her sentences that she was somewhat intimidated by his precise articulation.

“You remember what you said that day at Makin’ Her Ovah ?” she asked when they had finished the pizza and were sipping on their orange sodas.

Sovereign almost told her that he’d said many things, but he knew what she meant and nodded.

“I felt really bad when you said that.”

“Why?” he asked. “It was a compliment.”

“Yeah, but...”

“What?”

“The man that attacked you is Lemuel Johnson. I was with him that day he hit you but I didn’t know he was gonna do that. That’s why I screamed. When he went after you with that MP’s baton he had I screamed for him to stop. But he didn’t, so I stayed to help you.”

She said these words all in a rush. And behind his wall of blindness, Sovereign was not surprised. It was not that he suspected her of being in cahoots with his attacker, but she was alien, from some other world, and therefore presented difference. Most of the things she told him were windows onto a foreign experience — like her friend Tasha, who had befriended an older man at the behest of her boyfriend.

Cedric told Tasha that the old man had money and that he could pay her rent and they could have a place to stay until he got it together to pay for them — Cedric and Tasha — to get married .

What do you think about that? Sovereign had asked Toni.

It’d be all right if they told the man what they was doin’. I mean... he old an’ should know a young girl like Tasha ain’t gonna be all his — even if he paid for her rent. But if they lie like that then he might could get mad, an’ you know even a old man might have him a gun .

These last few words brought to Sovereign’s mind Eagle James.

“What were you doing with this Lemuel?” Sovereign was a little shocked by his equanimity.

“I had been wit’ him for three days — that time. His brother joined the army an’ left and his apartment was free for the rest of the month. Jacob gave Lemuel the key and we was gettin’ high an’ stayin’ there. Then he said, Lemuel said, that he needed some money and whenever he did he went ovah to the West Village and robbed some rich kids. He said all he had to do was scare ’em with his baton. I told him I didn’t like that idea but he said he was gonna do it anyway, and I had already been up in his house spendin’ his money for three days.”

“What difference does that make?” Sovereign asked, like a mechanic seeing an odd connection under the hood of a foreign-made truck.

“It was stupid but he made me feel like I was the reason he was broke and I owed it to him to go along. And he said that he nevah hit nobody too hard and so I said okay. It was stupid.”

“But then he attacked me.”

“And I started screamin’,” Toni said. “I didn’t even know I was gonna do that. But there you were, mindin’ yo’ own business, and he raised his club... I just screamed. I knew that it was wrong for me to be there.”

“But if you weren’t there he might have beaten me to death. You came with him and then, at the last minute, you broke away and did what was right.”

Silence.

The southern-facing windows of the apartment were open. Outside, a few blocks away, someone was practicing bagpipes on a rooftop somewhere. The sonorous tones seemed to writhe around Sovereign’s head, like he had to do to get comfortable in his own bed.

“You not mad?”

“Surprisingly, no, I’m not.”

“You not gonna fire me or tell the police?”

“Let me ask you something, Toni.”

“Yeah?”

“Have you seen Lemuel since that day?”

“He come ovah the house an’ told me that he’d kill me if I told the cops. I told him that if I was gonna tell the police that he’d already be in jail. Me too.”

“Was that the last time you saw him?”

Again there was a pause filled with the austere accompaniment of the Scottish pipes.

“He call me just about every week.”

“To make sure that you’re keeping your word?”

“Naw. He wanna get wit’ me.”

“He’s your boyfriend?”

“More like a jump-off. You know... somebody you see every now and then when you need to be with somebody.”

“And do you?”

“Do I what?”

“Need to be with him.”

“No.”

“But there’s something you’re not saying.”

“You know how I nevah have wine when we go out at them nice restaurants, Mr. James?” Toni Loam asked.

While nodding he thought that she used this proper address to get back inside the shelter of their relationship. She had probably been thinking about this confession for days, realizing that she had to make it but also hoping to keep her position with him.

“Lemuel was the first man I had evah been wit’,” she said. “I thought I loved him at first. But then it was only when we got drunk or high. When I get drunk I get sexy. So I don’t drink.”

“But you remember drinking, and when you do you remember loving Lemuel the thief.”

“Yeah, kinda like that.”

“... and so she knew the man who attacked you?” Seth Offeran asked the next day while Sovereign James ran the palm of his right hand across the rough fabric of the doctor’s sofa and while Toni Loam sat in the entrance hall on the leather banquette that surrounded a pillar at the far western side of that vast room. Even though this wasn’t one of their regular days, she had asked to come with him, because she wanted to hear right away if the doctor wanted him to fire her.