Charles Johnson - Faith and the Good Thing

Something was wrong. Faith waited, playing with a button on her dress.

Maxwell threw his arms around her waist and said, “They went for it!” His eyes were glazed and dilated, two tiny dots in a head swollen, she realized, with alcohol. Also, he had an erection, which he attempted to hide by sticking his right hand in his pocket.

Faith looked him dead in the face, frowning. “You’ve been drinking.” When he exhaled she smelled a good amount of gin on his breath. “What happened?” Then, because she was afraid of the situation, she sat down on the sofa. “Isaac, I said you’re drunk !”

He spoke quickly, clipping off the ends of his words and sliding articles into nouns as though he were speaking French. “Guess who’s going to handle that column and at a raise in pay and starting next month!”

Her eyes were on his ridiculous attempt to keep his profile turned from her. It slowly dawned on her that he wanted her to share his enthusiasm. All right. She stood up, still playing with her button, turning over phrases. Before she could decide on one Maxwell said, “Ragsdale — he’s the publisher, he went for it in a big way.” He was breathing heavily and paced the room, waving his arms and oblivious to the bulge in his trousers. “I didn’t think he would, not with the hell they’ve been giving me for weeks. Hey, I didn’t even think he liked me, you know?” He remembered his condition and turned to give Faith a three-quarter view of himself. “He’s shelved every idea I came up with since I got there. Great ideas! Like switching from their nine-column format to magazine style. No body uses nine columns anymore!” Maxwell crossed the room, placed his hand in his pocket, and managed to shove his erection down his right pants leg where it was less noticeable. Then he hurried back toward Faith. “The whole day started off wrong, what with that drunk this morning. And I missed the bus and had to walk the rest of the way to work. Jesus, I must have looked terrible, I mean, un professional! There were these big sweat rings under my arms and I was breathing hard and there was dirt under my nails. ”

Faith sat silent, watching him pace like Socrates before the Court. She tried to listen, but there was a pain in her right foot, which had fallen asleep. She’d crossed her right leg over her left; the blood rushing back made her foot feel leaden. She lowered it to the floor and wiggled her toes until feeling returned.

“So they’re all waiting for me, right. When I came in they were looking over my proposal in the conference room — Ragsdale, Cummings, the evening editor, and Lowell, he’s copy editor. Faith, lemme tell you — I was scared enough to pee in my pants. A chance to get over comes, maybe, only once in a man’s lifetime! And if you’re black, it may never come at all!” Maxwell gave a short, knowing laugh. “I mean black folks have been down so long, on the bottom, that our Will’s been weakened. We don’t know how to think big like other people. You know what I’m saying: poverty is a state of mind,” he pointed at his temple, “and I just wasn’t born to be poor, you know?”

Faith wiggled the right toes on her foot cautiously. “Yes, I know.” But she wondered about that, about what she really knew of Maxwell. Her information was scanty. Sometimes, when she looked at him, he didn’t seem to be there at all. She saw a somewhat poorly polished gesture, but never anything she might call Maxwell. Not even when he was naked — even then he seemed heavily clothed with layers and layers of popular culture grafted on but never reaching to that level she could call Maxwell himself. Maybe he was like a suit of armor, empty inside. Regardless, it was easier to pretend he had no past — that they, like two slaves promenading on Sunday in their owner’s old clothes, had just met in the French Quarter in New Orleans, that they needed to know nothing other than that she was a woman and he was a man who would take care of her if they ran away from bondage. A suit of armor, after all, would shield her from the cold. Still, she remembered the salient elements of his life: attending one poorly equipped ghetto school after another, soaking up all the literature, books, and movies that presented an image of a more affluent life, and writing to purge himself of frustration. Unexpectedly, he won a scholarship to a junior college, and, just as unexpectedly, he graduated at the head of his class and gave a commencement-day speech on — you guessed it—“The Power of Will.” Faith closed her eyes. It was easier to pretend he had no past. “I know, Isaac,” she said.

“It was crazy, Faith! Ragsdale looked up from my proposal and said, ‘It looks good.’ ” Maxwell stopped in the center of the floor, his face wooden and his shoulders hunched forward, a queer hitch in his voice. “I wish my father was around right now. It would have meant a lot to him, you know? He never really got off the bottom.” Maxwell pulled at his nose, sober, staring at Faith. “He was a janitor all his life and glad to be one. Sometimes I’d be at home, writing in a corner of the room, and he’d drag in from the plant with dust in his hair and eyes, and ask me what I was doing. And when I told him, he’d say, ‘There ain’t no place for a black boy who does that.’ You understand? He was whipped, Faith — somebody snuffed out the Will in him like you do a candle.” Perhaps Maxwell tasted something bad: he curled back his lips as if he did. “He pandered me! I couldn’t stand it. He thought I was weak and asthmatic and couldn’t do anything else — I mean, do hard work with my back like he did. But he was wrong, you see, because Lowell nodded his head and said they wanted to start the column in about a month, and Cummings told me to pick the prisoner I want to author it.” Maxwell smiled, a warm feeling in his chest. “I’ll get an extra day off — Monday, and about a hundred dollars a week more. ”

Faith’s eyebrows raised. “A hundred?”

“You can’t get rich in media, honey,” Maxwell laughed, “not unless you own the paper. That’s freedom of the press — the publisher’s free to print anything he wants. The point is that they’re finally giving me some responsibility — I can branch out, put some money away and, maybe, in a few years start my own magazine.” He looked straight into her eyes for the first time that evening. “They trust me.”

“Faugh!”

“What was that?”—Maxwell.

“Nothing, maybe someone in the hallway.” Faith felt at a loss. She understood in a cerebral sort of way, not with her heart, his need for this thing. She even wanted him to have it. “I’m glad,” she said. It sounded false; she shot her voice up an octave: “I’m glad !”

He seemed to believe her. “Anyway, I will branch out soon. It takes time, you know? If I show them I can handle this, maybe they’ll let me do a signed column next — on race or something. I’ve got some strong opinions on that. I’ve got time to move up and I’ve got potential. Ragsdale said so, those were his words. You know I wouldn’t toot my own horn.” For a second he was silent, visibly exhausted and a little bit high from so much speech; his shoulders slouched, his arms hung like slabs of beef on meathooks at his side. “What do you think?”

“I think it’s wonderful,” Faith said. “I hope it turns out all right for you.”

“For us !” Maxwell shouted. “I’m doing all this for both of us!” Then he smiled, wily, and laughed as he took her hands and lifted her off the sofa. “But you’ll have to act right, stay in a woman’s place, I mean.”

Faith said, “Right,” and he released her, stepping in front of her living-room mirror to adjust his wig and smooth back his mustache with spittle. “We can talk about what I have in mind later. If we hurry,” he glanced at his wristwatch, “we can make it to the theater in time for the show. I can’t stand being late.”