Charles Johnson - Faith and the Good Thing

She didn’t want to hear it. The sunlight broke between two skyscrapers overhead and seemed to focus on that part of her brow burning with pain. The elastic in her underwear felt as tight as a corset and (she was certain) was ruining her digestion. Holding her head, she said, “I’m sorry, Isaac. I suppose I stepped out of line.” Something inside her laughed but she kept her face straight. “You’re right.”

“Sorry don’t help.” He scowled, trying to breathe as slowly as possible. His throat rattled. “Don’t feel sorry for anybody from now on, especially for lushes like that one. He gave you a line, honey! People like that’ll use you!” He chewed the corner of his mouth, watching the streetlight on the opposite block turn green. “You’re just lucky you’ve got me around to watch out for you.” Then he kissed her for the benefit of anyone who might see by holding her shoulders, pushing his face against her and tipping her slightly over backward. That done, he wiped his lips and crossed the street with a slight swagger, forcing other pedestrians to step out of his way.

. five, six, seven. Faith let the smile fall from her face. He was across the street, strutting like a rooster toward the bus stop. As she stood there on the crowded street, people parting and passing her on either side, she wondered, and not without a sinking feeling in her stomach, Who was Isaac Maxwell? What, after all those evenings sacrificed in snaring him, after all the times she’d tasted the interior of his mouth made bitter by his asthma spray, did she really know about him? Perhaps it wasn’t important. Perhaps it was only important that he was pliable, like soft clay, and at least thought that he loved her. Her own feelings were more nebulous. She remembered that it took three days of looking in department stores before she found the Valentine card she wanted to send him. Not that she wanted to send it, but he considered such things as greeting cards and ties at Christmas to be important. Most of them had said something wholly unacceptable like “I love you.” The thought of it made her shiver. Another had a cartoon figure of a girl with a caption that read “Thinking of you.” Which was a lie. In the end she had made him a card, cutting it out herself and writing her own noncommittal message. “You couldn’t afford to buy me one?” he asked, holding it away from him as if it were a bit unclean. “ That’s what you think of me?”

What she did think of him, she could never say to his face. If she loved him — and she had by no means made up her mind — it was the way a Confederate and Union soldier had to love each other, as adversaries who unwillingly draw closer in conflict. The scene of battle was his bedroom (a horrible affair in her mind; there were Ebony pinup girls pasted over the head of his double bed and patterns describing a hundred and one positions for sexual congress on the bedspread). It was touch-and-go, a chess game. The first night she had allowed him to kiss her, there on the battlefield, he felt somewhat victorious. Then he turned sour and stepped across the room from her. “Who the hell taught you to kiss like that?” His face was pinched and sad, like a child’s ready to cry but not wanting to. “ I didn’t teach you to do that,” and he demanded to know who did. And so it went each weekend, he trying to possess more and more of her, and she trying to squeeze a proposal from him. He was her object, pure and simple, and she was his, and between them this twirling exchange for supremacy of wills, as he called it, built a tension or bond that she was willing to call, for want of a better word, love. You took what you could get. Somehow it was all right. It worked out even fine (the bills were paid and the worst part of her bondage had passed), even though, late at night when she stood before her apartment’s picture window, barefoot on the thick carpet Maxwell had nailed down himself, and looked at the stillness of her neighborhood, she thought she heard Barrett’s voice just above the wind, telling her all this was horribly wrong. And she would feel grief build in her chest, and for no apparent reason at all, except that she felt filled with some oceanic painful-pleasurable awareness of her own self-betrayal in contrast to her life’s half-forgotten promise. Laughing, she’d wipe away these tears, calling them foolish and feeling astonished by her own weakness of will, which Maxwell so deplored. Weakness, sympathy, faith, love — all these were stupid, surely. She knew she was in bondage (the image of a frog caught in the mouth of a snake came to her, only one of its green legs visible and wiggling in the air), knew herself to be encrusted with the filth of a past beyond her control. The filth of the present beyond her control was understandable then. But at those hollow, lonely hours her thoughts would return to Barrett, then to Reverend Brown, and the terror and closeness she had felt and felt still in the depths of the cave. She would purse her lips, her eyes shut tight to close out even the light of the moon, and whisper, as in days of yore, “Thank You. ” Chills crawled along her spine and a sense of dread or fear stuck in her throat like a cotton hook. Even for this, Thank You, for this confusion and pain because, through pain, I know I can still feel; for this chance to persist, even if in deceit as Todd had done. Thank You — for this clownish, pitifully genuine, but cowlike lover, this good thing of mine.

Tired, though she had only been up a few hours, Faith went home to sleep, certain Maxwell would propose and bring the battle to an end. She could feel it in her throat.

• • •

After a time she awoke in her bedroom, stretched out, and checked the electric clock on her nightstand. Six-thirty. She’d slept late, as much as eight hours, but felt she deserved it. She could have passed the morning in reading her shorthand book from the Mueller Vocational College on the North Side, but why study when she might soon be able to avoid work altogether? Maxwell believed that men were the providers and women should stay at home. Fine, she thought, glad he was so foolish. The idea of work, she remembered, had affected Big Todd in this way, too. Long ago, on one of their walks, he’d told her about the time he worked in a cotton mill. The work wore at his spirit. In a week he’d lost nearly seven pounds from the heat alone. They expected Todd to work five days a week, but he came only three, Monday through Wednesday. This went on for five weeks straight until Todd’s foreman could stand it no longer.

When Todd appeared Monday morning, the foreman cornered him in the locker room. Said, “Cross, what the hell is this? For a month you’ve been comin’ in three days a week! You got an explanation?”

Todd leaned close to him, picking his teeth with a straw. “Listen, I come in three whole days of the week because I really need the money. ”

It was that simple. But Maxwell already earned enough for him and Faith to live on, and that was what it — life — was all about, to hear him tell it. Getting by. No sooner had she thought this than she heard a whisper in her bedroom: “Consider, child. your Good Thing. ” Rattled, she rose to her feet, pulled on her bathrobe, and went to her mirror, angry and refusing to acknowledge the suggestion of Barrett’s sad eyes staining a corner of the glass. “I don’t need advice!” she said to herself. “And I certainly don’t need the Good Thing anymore.” She brushed her hair for one hundred slowly counted strokes, showered, rubbed cold cream on her ashy ankles and legs, and dressed in the living room. At exactly eight she heard her door chimes and, since Maxwell had a key, he let himself in. He staggered into the room, his toes pointed outward as he took long strides to the sectional sofa where he dropped his trench coat.