Charles Johnson - Faith and the Good Thing

“Your boyfriend quit today!” he shouted in a whisky tenor.

She nibbled her fingernail, bit her forefinger, and winced, watching it bleed.

“Did you hear me?” Maxwell said. “Jones came in today at closing time and said he wasn’t gonna work on the goddamn column no more!” He held out the fingers on both his hands and spread them as he pursed his lips. “ Pffft! Just like that. He walked out on me. ”

She could hear her own heart hammering, as loud as a voodoo drum in a New Orleans swamp. It hurt her chest. Faith sat down on the chair to her left, holding her head. “What did he say?”

“He said he quit, that’s what he said.” Maxwell’s mouth twisted clear across his face. “He said he was leaving town to take a goddamn job as a goddamn illustrator for a goddamn ad firm in New York City.”

Something slapped her stomach, from the inside. Please stop swearing, she thought. She bent forward, felt her head swim, and tottered to the bathroom where she jackknifed, vomiting into the bowl. Too weak to rise, she heard Maxwell’s voice behind her.

“What do you think of that ?” he said. “After all I did for him—”

There was a great claw flexing around her heart, crushing her insides. She dry-heaved, and this time she brought up black clots of blood. Maxwell dropped to her side, catching her around her waist before she fell forward. He carried her in his arms back to the bedroom, drew back the covers, and dropped her on the bed.

“I’m going to call a doctor,” he said. He wagged his finger at her. “Uh huhn —I don’t want to hear it! You’re sick.”

Faith sat up, shivering now. Sweating. He didn’t know. He still, perhaps, loved her. There was still time.

Now.

“Honey,” she said weakly, aware that her voice was hoarse, “come here.” She had not called him that in months, not since his last visit to her bedroom. He froze in the doorway, his face full of doubt. “Come closer,” she whispered, horrified by the hollow echo in her voice. Maxwell sat down on the bed beside her, his hands hanging heavy between his knees, his eyes vacant.

“We’re going to have a baby. ”

The voice of the dead living was behind Maxwell’s reply, a voice that has no mind, no sense, no emotion directing it. The larynx and vocal cords sound like taut strings wired in a small box located in the throat of a ventriloquist’s dummy; the sounds grate from the lips like chalk scraping a blackboard, severed from thought: “A baby. ” His mouth shut with a snap.

All the air in her bedroom rushed to a single corner, far, far away from them. She heard a wheeze, a rattle deep in his throat. “We?”

She wanted to lie down. To wrap herself with the sheets, or in a shroud of dry forest leaves. To sleep.

Thought returned to Maxwell, coloring his words like blood slowly staining cloth. “We’re— we? — are going to. ” He sucked in his breath violently and stood over her, his palms pressed against his chest, his shirt collar, his legs stiff and head pushed forward. “We’re going to have a baby !”

Do something, she thought. Why was it taking so long to sink in? She had to wait, motionless, for his move. It came. Like retribution, destiny, or a curse it came. Before her eyes his expression glided through a rosary of emotions — bemusement, suppressed rage — like a mime gone mad. The muscles around his mouth hardened; they stood out like tiny tumors burgeoning beneath his skin.

His voice grunted, sobbing from syllable to syllable. “You must think I’m a fool!” He tottered away from her bed, suddenly sober and choking for air. He searched his pockets for his respirator but only came up with lint. Maxwell swayed for a moment, snatched off his wig, and threw it to the floor. He whirled toward her. “ We are going to have a baby?” he screamed. “Baby, we aren’t going to have any thing! I can’t even—” Maxwell closed his eyes and fought for breath; he turned from her on his heels and drove the flat of his fist against the wall. Once. Plaster rained from the ceiling to the floor. He looked at the gray shards from the ceiling scattered at his feet, and his face went slack. He looked at her, and she could hear him thinking, Look what I did. He seemed to be in control again. Said, “Bitch!” barely under his breath to define her, to frame her for the assault building in his mind. She could see his lips trembling under the exercise of his Will Power, his desire to not say a single word until he had thought it through. Then his face changed. He drew his lips back over his teeth, he narrowed his eyes at her, the wings of his nose went open, and his right hand rose, pointing a forefinger at her head like a pistol.

“Let me tell you something! I tried to play it straight from the first day I met you — I didn’t ask any questions when it looked like you didn’t want to give me an answer, but I told you everything about me. Didn’t I?” He was shaking, remembering things he had said to her about his childhood, remembering his confidence. “Shit!” he swore to snap himself back. “I trusted you; I didn’t think you’d lie to me, and even if I did catch you in a lie I thought you were doing it for my own good — our good — to keep us together. Even that insanity about the Good Thing, and the time you spent hustling in that goddamn hotel — it was all okay.” Maxwell wiped away water from his eyes; he clenched his fists for control. “If you loved me I figured it was okay if you lied. And afterward I was glad that you told me. even though I didn’t know how to act anymore. I didn’t know how to get next to you — to make you feel something for me. I thought buying you the car might do it. Or maybe if I could turn you on in bed—” He stopped, looking away, ashamed. “Maybe I was stupid — I’ve got less feeling than you, isn’t that the way you put it one time, less feeling and faith. I ain’t in tune with the universe! Well, I had some kinda faith, all right, because I believed in you, Faith! I lay there on that goddamn davenport in the living room night after night, believing that you’d make the next move, the right move — that you’d come in there and show me what I needed to do to keep us together.” Maxwell bent forward, wringing his hands. “Do you understand? — you meant so much to me that I kept quiet when I saw you messing with that — that — that— boy ! Yeah, I knew, but you meant. that much. to me—”

Maxwell rushed to her bedside, his left arm trapping her, his right squeezing a clump of her hair as he, then she, cried.

“. and you still want to play me for a fool, a chump, a pathetic little clown.” He brought his right palm against her face. Once. Twice — a third time. Hard. “You can go live with your barefoot boy for all care. It’s his, isn’t it?” He waited. Faith could not answer. He slapped her. “Isn’t it?”

“Yes!” She felt relieved. It was all out now; it was all over.

Maxwell pointed at her, lost his thought, frowned, and stood momentarily confused. Then he recaptured it. “Get out of here!” His hands dropped to his side. “I don’t want to see you here in the morning—”

Blood running from her nose slipped through Faith’s fingers, flowed to her dress and onto the bed. There was no stopping it, and she breathed huskily through her mouth. Maxwell crossed to her closet and ripped clothes from their wire hangers. He held her ermine cloak high in the air and muttered, “God!” then flung it to the center of the floor. He perfectly enunciated, “Go on!” carefully, slowly, like a voice on an English-language recording. All was stillness in the room. They were manikins behind a store’s smooth glass window, he standing with his right foot forward, his left knee locked, and his hand in his pocket, she covering her face. Their lips were parted as though to say more, but neither moved, nor did breath break the perfection of their outlines and those of the bed, chairs, and dresser covered with cosmetics.