Charles Johnson - Faith and the Good Thing

For the occasion, Faith dressed in a cream-colored, box-pleated skirt, argyle cardigan, and brown pumps, deciding, when she was inside Maxwell’s Buick, that the prospects for a life with him were propitious. She could push him; it wouldn’t be hard. They would work out a comfortable agreement, an unwritten contract involving, on his side, food, furniture, comfort, and security somewhere in the surrounding crime-free suburbs; and on her side, the provision of children, but not at first, cooking until they found someone to cover this inconvenience, and, of course, the obligatory sacrifice of sex Lavidia had found so abhorrent. She looked at his profile as he drove down Michigan Avenue, quieter now with couples strolling along the sidewalks, into restaurants, and toward the lakefront. Would he, at some unforeseen time, expect more than duty from her? She closed her eyes, experiencing first the play of light and patterns along her eyelids, then a vision that was brief but terrifying: suppose after thirty or forty years or so, after a lifetime of duty and coping and ceaseless arguments repeated so often they could start each one up anew at any point, at the beginning, middle, or end; suppose after fifty years they found themselves sitting across from each other in a semidark kitchen overlooking a quiet backyard of peonies, petunias, and sweet-smelling ferns, the sink filled with greasy dishes behind them, the walls lined with shelves of teapots that jingled “Tea for Two,” milk-glass statues, and placards engraved with kitchen prayers like:

Bless my little kitchen, Lord,

I love its every nook,

And bless me as I do my work,

Wash pots and pans and cook.

suppose they stared across that table, looking up from their untouched bowls of salad, glaring at the outlines of the kitchen, at the stark figures of the electric wall clock, the gigantic ornamental spoon and fork made of wood, the calendar they’d forgotten to change, the bulletin board covered with phone numbers with which they could associate no names, no faces; suppose in all that they peered at each other across the gulf between their lives like two duelers facing one another on some misty moor, wondering, in that brittle, graying age, Who is this? And, I —? Would he be openly hostile then? His hairline would stretch back behind his head, ending in gray fuzz. Hard old age would be upon him. He would wear blue-and-red suspenders that strained over an obscenely rotund belly. His toothless mouth would look like a fresh wound, and he would accuse her of his failures, his humiliations so sure to come. Faith smiled to herself, leaned over, and kissed Maxwell’s cheek. She would be just a wrinkle then — old, evil like Lavidia. But she remembered the statistics: 13,500 black men stricken dead as stone from hypertension, one out of every seven, the newspapers had said. They had twice the chance of collapsing from stroke as whites. Maxwell’s life expectancy would, if he was lucky, be no more than 64.1 years. She would outlive him; she could wait. He would begin wheezing and clutching his wrinkled throat at the table; his head would pitch forward into his salad bowl. She saw herself rising from the table, starting to dial the police or the fire department, then stopping, turning around, and descending the rubber-matted back stairs to the yard. She would bend down to the white peonies growing beside the sidewalk, bury her nose in one, and withdraw it filled with a fragrance as sweet as wine. Dew from the petals would be moist against her lips. She would smile, thinking of the insurance.

“I’m almost too worked up to enjoy the show,” Maxwell said. “I should be at home working on the column, you know? Turning over all the possibilities so — ha ha — nothing can slip through my fingers.” He glanced at her sheepishly, sly. “I never did tell you my whole theory of Will Power, did I?”

“No,” Faith said, but she remembered the curious collection of books stacked along the floor of his bedroom. Some belonged to The Power Book Library and were long out of print. She had flipped through a few when he left to buy her a pack of cigarettes. The titles were peculiar: Power of Will, Will for Success, a few books by Horatio Alger, Colin Wilson, Norman Vincent Peale, and a slim one about a seagull. She hadn’t been able to make sense of any of them. “You never told me,” she said.

Maxwell chuckled and began beating rhythms on the steering wheel with his palm. “It came to me when I was watching a Rose Bowl game — sort of like a revelation. All those men in conflict and one of them carrying the ball across the field through dint of pure Will. Beautiful!” He looked at her, all seriousness. “That’s life in a nutshell. Tennyson said it better than me— O living Will, thou shalt endure, When all that seems shall suffer shock. Will Power can overcome anything, you see? I know it for a fact, because whenever I feel an asthma attack coming on, I can just will it right away.”

“You can?” Faith looked at him hard. “How?”

“Pure strength of Will,” Maxwell snapped. He sucked at foreign matter in his teeth and shifted the car into fourth. “Will Power’s a self-preservative principle of evolution. I figured it all out. It’s superior to matter and stronger than mind, and that’s why man’s been able to survive on this miserable planet for so long. If nature threatened him, he could conquer it.” Maxwell’s right hand left the steering wheel; he held it out above the dashboard, drawing his fingers together in a tight fist. “A man can accomplish any thing if his Will Power’s strong enough, Faith.” He seemed to remember something and lowered his hand, glancing sideways at her. “But you have to direct the Will toward what’s right and good, of course.”

Faith slid up in her seat. “What is right?”

“Security and comfort,” Maxwell laughed, still sucking at his teeth. “Being on top of things, having nice things, respect, a little authority — feeling like a man. Things like that.”

She left that alone. It hung heavy in the close space of the car, like gas from a sick person’s bowels, until she, to clear the air, said, “I guess.” It didn’t matter what he thought, or if he thought at all, which was still questionable, as long as he was sweet. Sometimes. “That’s your theory?” she asked finally. “That’s all ?”

Maxwell reddened a little. “I know it needs some work. I’m not writing it up for Mind or the Philosophical Review, you know! All the implications aren’t worked out — I know that — but it’s how I feel about things and it helps me stay in the race.” He shoved out his lower lip and changed the subject. “You got our tickets?”

She said, “Yes,” and produced them after Maxwell left his Buick in an underground parking lot and led her to the door of the theater. He guided her into an immense lobby embellished with Oriental decorations, then up four flights of red-carpeted stairs. From that height, the proscenium was minuscule, adrift at sea before hundreds of people seated below. Maxwell looked curiously at their tickets, then for their seats.

“Those people,” he said finally, pointing to an old couple, “they’ve got our seats.”

The couple looked nonchalantly at them. They were both nondescript, just an average, portly, moon-faced man and wife dressed in Sunday-service clothing, waiting for the show. Maxwell bent toward the man and tried to explain that those seats, paid for in advance, were his. The man said nothing. His face was like the cement in an old cellar, rough irregular lines lying thick and lumpy along a hard, white surface. He remained rooted in place like an oak. Maxwell perspired, fingered his respirator nervously, and returned angrily to Faith.