Cindy was a skinny young white woman who had gone to some fancy college and already had her own office. I had met her on her first day at the job. She was lost and I walked her to the place where the orientation was being held. Even though I’d forgotten her name when she was crying on that bench, I remembered her and couldn’t just walk away.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, taking the seat next to her.

  “I, I, I don’t even know.” She tried to laugh at how ridiculous that must have sounded but instead more tears flowed out.

  I put my arms around her as Tiny had always done for me when I was distraught. I cried a lot as a child because the other children so often made fun of me.

  Cindy Brickerman grabbed on to me and sobbed. I had nothing to say. I didn’t even remember her name and so I sat there and held her thinking about how generous and loving my adoptive aunt had been.

  After a few minutes the crying subsided a bit and Cindy’s grip loosened.

  “You don’t know why you’re crying?” I asked.

  “John Hightower called me into his office today,” she told me. “He said that I was going to be put in charge of my department. Shauna Finn is leaving and, and he wants me to take her place.”

  She grabbed on tight again and cried some more. I held on as the lunch hour faded away.

  “What’s wrong with a promotion?” I asked after a bit. “Don’t you feel like you can do the job?”

  “It’s not that. I don’t know. I’m just so stupid. I know this is a good job and that I should be happy. My parents are so proud of me. But I don’t care about investment possibilities in Zimbabwe or how much oil there is in the ground under Venezuela. I only want, want…”

  “What is it that you want?” I asked.

  I leaned back and looked her in the eye.

  “I don’t know,” she said, “not exactly. I want my life to mean something. You know?”

  The words were like an old favorite song in my mind. It wasn’t that I shared her desire but that I also felt that life didn’t mean much to anyone outside of physical needs and the emotional reactions to those needs. One could walk one way just as well as another, marry one spouse or stay single, raise a family or go off to war. It was all the same in the end—and on the way to the end too.

  “Yeah,” I said, “yes I do understand. It’s very often that I say to myself that people should just ask themselves what they want and get up and go that way.”

  Cindy was staring into my eyes and I felt something deep down inside me; something like an eruption, maybe even a solar flare. Cindy gasped, I remember. She was looking at me as if I had become something else while sitting there.

  “That’s true, isn’t it?” she said. “It’s like turning your head or looking up.”

  We remained in that loose embrace for a few minutes more and then, without saying a word, we got up and walked back toward work. For a block or so we held hands. It wasn’t anything amorous. We just felt close.

  Once, a week later, she came down to the mailroom to visit. The magic of our connection, though not gone, was muted. That didn’t seem to matter though. She brought me a small box of four chocolates and said thank you.

  Gerard made insinuations for the rest of the afternoon.

  “Truman gettin’ a little something from that white girl,” he said as if there was a third person in the room.

  A few weeks later the little pink envelope came and I kept it in the drawer to remember how sweet life could be even while being meaningless.

  The phone rang startling me.

  “True?” Olive Breve said.

  It took me a moment to reorient myself and to remember who the voice belonged to and why she would be calling me.

  “Hi, Olive.”

  “I just called to remind you that we’re supposed to be meeting at six fifteen. I remember how you get distracted at work sometimes.”

  A sound like an explosion on a floor far below went off in my chest. That was the sex I remembered with Olive. She made me happy because she paid attention to me. The sex we had was all her. She was bigger than me and stronger too. The first time at her apartment she climbed up over me and said, “I need this right now.”

  “I’ll be there, Olive,” I said. “I’m leaving in a few minutes.”

  * * *

  “OVER HERE, TRUE.”

  The coffee shop was crowded but Olive had taken a seat by the window. There were two large paper cups sitting on her table. I remember thinking that this was the best Olive. She looked the way she had midway in our brief relationship. She was larger than the last time I saw her but not nearly as heavy as when we first met. It was the moment that she began to see that she could achieve her goal and become the image she had in her mind. That was when she was the happiest and I was still an important part of her life.

  I remembered the nights when I was sound asleep and the phone would ring. I’d wake up and see that it was midnight or later and Olive would be there on the line.

  “I’m downstairs, True,” she’d say, “and I’m comin’ to get ya.”

  * * *

  I SAT DOWN across from her and she smiled. Her hair was blond now instead of brunette and her eyes were brighter.

  “What are you looking at?” she asked.

  “Your eyes … they’re … bluer.”

  “That’s my contacts.”

  “Oh.”

  “I got you chamomile,” she said. “You never drink coffee, right?”

  “Thank you.”

  I sipped my tea while she regarded me.

  “It’s nice to see you, Truman.”

  “You too,” I said.

  She smiled at my answer. “You never did talk much did you?”

  “I’m a little shy about talking. My aunt Tiny used to say that there’s a lot more to hear than there is to say.”

  “How is Tiny?” Olive asked.

  “She’s in a nursing home.”

  “Oh,” Olive said with some sorrow in her face.

  “It’s okay. She likes the people in her ward and there’s a window she can sit by. They have a TV and she can watch her shows. I see her at least three times a week. I’m going there tonight after we have our coffee.”

  “Hm,” Olive said, speculating on words I hadn’t spoken.

  “What?”

  “You made a plan to see me with an escape hatch built in.” This was the later Olive, the one that was easy to anger, the Olive who needed a man she could show off her new beauty with; a man that wasn’t me.

  “You’re the one who made the plan, Olive. I always see Tiny on Thursday nights.”

  She smiled and I looked to my right. Sitting there, four tables away, was Minerva. She had on the same pajamalike clothes and was sitting alone, holding a coffee cup to her chin and smiling—at me.

  I turned back and saw that Olive was smiling too.

  “I’ve been made a portfolio manager at my firm,” she said.

  “Congratulations.”

  “Tristram made partner at Grumbacher and Lewis.”

  “That’s nice. You guys must have a great condo or something.”

  Olive leaned forward and took my hand. She looked at me with that old time yearning in her eyes.

  “I’m so sorry, True,” she said. “I never meant to hurt you like that.”

  “It was a long time ago, Olive,” I said, glancing over at Minerva.

  She winked at me.

  “But I was wrong.”

  “You fell in love, only it wasn’t with me,” I said.

  “So you don’t care?”

  It struck me at that moment that something was wrong. Between the madness that was Minerva, Miss Metcalf’s outrageous attempt to have me fired, then T. S. Hoad’s incursion, and now Olive calling me out of nowhere, apologizing for an affair turned sour over a decade before … something was definitely wrong.

  That something showed in my face.

  “What, True?” Olive asked.

  “I don’t know. I mean my life’s been upside down lately. Everything is happening at once … Let me ask you something.”

  “What?” Olive said.

  “I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, I mean, I’m not saying anything about you I just need to know something.”

  “What?”

  “Why did you call me the day before yesterday?” I said. “I don’t mean why did you call me but why on that day? Right then?”

  “I … I had a dream about you the night before.” She stuck out her lower lip and nodded.

  “What was the dream about, I mean, what happened in the dream?”

  “Why are you asking?”

  “Just tell me. Okay?”

  Olive leaned back and looked up at the ceiling. She was still quite pretty and very fetching in her tight-fitting red pantsuit. She knew that red was my favorite color.

  “You were standing at the entrance of a graveyard,” she said, her face revealing surprise as if she had not considered the content of the dream before. “And, and you had your hands raised up and there was music playing. There was a girl, a young woman standing off to the side. She was laughing.”

  “What was she wearing?” I asked.

  “It was a dream, Truman, not something real.”

  “Just tell me, Olive.”

  “A, a pantsuit. Yellow. With these green drawings on it.”

  I wondered then if I was really there in that coffee shop. Was I in an institution somewhere in a straightjacket between padded walls? Was I sitting at a table babbling to myself while everyone ignored me?

  “True, what’s wrong?” Olive asked.

  “I have to go, Olive. I have to go see my aunt.”

  “But I need to talk to you.”

  “About what?”

  “I realized something after that dream.”

  “What?”

  “That’s why I apologized,” she said. “When I woke up Tristram was lying there next to me sound asleep. We’ve had a good eleven years together. He’s cute and rich and my parents love him. My mom’s always saying that ever since I’ve been with T that my life has been getting better. And I agreed with her but the other morning, after that dream, I realized that it wasn’t T who helped me. He only saw me after the change, after I lost weight and decided to climb the ranks in investments.

  “It was when I met you that everything changed. You planted the seed in me. When I said I wanted to exercise you said that we should walk from downtown to my place every day. When I said that I didn’t like my job and that I wanted to work somewhere else you said that I should change myself not my job.”

  “I did?”

  “Don’t you remember?”

  “I was probably thinking about your kisses,” I said, rather lamely.

  “That’s why I wanted to see you,” she said, looking into my eyes again. “I want you to take me back.”

  I was a scrawny, middle-aged black man who had no blood family, who had worked in a mailroom his entire life. But still Olive was willing to throw her lot in with mine rather than ride the high life with Tristram Charles. It made no sense at all.

  “Don’t you want me, True?”

  “I don’t know why you want me, O,” I said falling back into our old intimacy.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Am I like a diet plan or an exercise regimen for you?” I said. “Am I a flashlight to have around in case the lights go out?”

  These notions hadn’t occurred to Olive. She thought that her offer would thrill me, that her coming back, even if it was after a twelve-year hiatus, was something that I’d jump for.

  “But we were so good together,” she said.

  “You’re a good woman, O,” I said. “You took me in and showed me something I was too afraid to go after. You made me a man in the way women make men.”

  “You’ve changed, True.”

  “Only in the past two, three days,” I said. “If you saw me Monday I would have been just like when you met me in that library.”

  “Take me back, Baby,” she said. “Ever since that dream I’ve known that my life is just empty. There’s nothing wrong with Tristram or my job—but I know now that there was once magic in my life. In the dream I was the dead and you were calling to me.”

  Minerva was gone.

  That was a powerful moment. Minerva had slipped away again but the madness seemed to increase. I felt heavy and liquid like the element mercury. My breathing seemed to have deep meaning while the world around me looked flimsy and impermanent.

  “I have to go, O,” I said with the equanimity of the ages. “So tell me what you want.”

  “You.”

  “That’s not gonna happen,” I said. “I’m not for sale or barter, not anymore.”

  Olive’s face began to quiver. Deep creases formed in her trembling lips.

  “What, what if you just came to see me one night. One night. We don’t have to make love or anything like that, I just need to talk it all out.”

  “You want me to help you crawl out of that grave?”

  Her eyes cleared and she sat up looking at me with odd certainty.

  Instead of getting angry like I expected she said, “Exactly.”

  * * *

  ON MY JOURNEY uptown I caught glimpses of Minerva here and there. She’d be crossing the street or going past me in the opposite direction. Finally she was smiling at me from the far end of a subway car. I knew that she was just a figment of my imagination and resolved, right there on the Number Six train, to ignore her.

  “What?” a woman sitting next to me asked.

  She was young and dark skinned, even smaller than I.

  “Oh,” I said. “Sorry, I must have been talking to myself.”

  I expected that at the least she would grimace, she might even get up and move farther down the car. But instead the young woman smiled.

  “My daddy’s like that,” she said. “Sometimes he’s thinkin’ so hard that he have a whole conversation before we stop him. My mama used to say that he better never get rich ’cause if he did all she’d have to do is invite the judge ovah to dinner an’ my daddy’d be committed before dessert.”

  I laughed wondering if the young woman was really there next to me on the train or just another delusion.

  “I’m Truman Pope,” I said, holding out a hand.

  “Maud Lolling,” she replied, pumping my hand like we’d just made a wager. “I didn’t mean to say that you were old like my daddy, Mr. Pope. It’s just that you reminded me of him.”

  “I’m past forty,” I said.

  “But you got a young face and you don’t laugh like older people do. It’s only your eyes look like they seen a lot.”

  “A lot of nothing.”

  She smiled again.

  The train was slowing down.

  “This is my stop,” I said.

  There was a flash of disappointment on her face.

  “I work at Higgenbothem, Brightend, and Hoad,” I said as the brakes whined. “They call it HBH.”

  “Why you tellin’ me that?”

  “Just in case you want to know.”

  * * *

  “HI, BABY,” my aunt Tiny said.

  She was watching a TV show. I’ve never been able to watch TV for very long. The stories jumped around too much and I found myself getting lost in the commercials. But I sat next to the only family I had while she watched the last few minutes of the apparently heart-wrenching drama.

  * * *

  “WHEN I WAS a boy did I act funny?” I asked her when the show was over and we were sitting next to the big window at the far end of the ward.

  “Funny how?”

  “Crazy like?”

  “Uh-uh. You was always sweet an’ nice an’ helpful too,” she said. “Why you ask that?”

  “I saw this girl dressed in yellow but nobody else saw her. Later on I saw her again and she talked to me but didn’t leave any footprints on a dusty floor.”

  Ernestina “Tiny” Pope was a huge woman and unable to walk a city block without stopping for a nap. She was older than her years, worn down by hard labor and deep poverty but her mind remained sharp.

  “You always saw things,” she murmured.

  “What things?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t see ’em. But you did. You really did.”

  “Like when?”

  “One time, when you wasn’t no more than four you pointed up at a clear blue sky an’ said, ‘They movin’.”

  “Who was movin’? I aksed you and you said it was some peoples that had lived inside the earth but now they were bothered and had to pass on to someplace new. You said that by the time they got where they was goin’ that there wouldn’t be no more people like there’s people today.”

  “I said that everybody would be dead?”

  “That’s what I aksed,” Tiny said, “but you said that everything is always turnin’, turnin’ an’ that we had to leave these bodies and dreams behind.

  “You were beautiful as a child, True, but then the kids and the teachers at school ruined all that. They made funa’ you an’ called you retarded. They gave you Fs ’cause you knew too much or you didn’t care about what they had to say.

  “So now if you startin’ to see people and knowin’ things again you shouldn’t think it’s ’cause you crazy, Baby. You ain’t crazy. You were a gift to me and to the whole world.”

  Tiny had begun to breathe heavily and I worried about her overworked heart so I changed to subject to the nurse, Sigrid Marcone, who Tiny loved. We talked for an hour or so about Sigrid’s wayward son and all the children he had sired by three different women. After a good laugh I kissed Tiny’s broad cheek and left for my apartment.

  Minerva walked with me down the dark streets. She was luminescent at night but I didn’t talk to her and she had nothing to say to me. We just walked side by side—a man and his mania.

  PART TWO

  WHEN I GOT home I was exhausted. It had been three very long days and I felt that it was only a matter of time before the authorities came and took me away to the madhouse. I was heartened by what Tiny had told me but the fact that I saw things that other people didn’t, even if those things really were there, meant those other people would have to think I was crazy.

  I fell into bed with all my clothes and even my shoes still on. I didn’t take two breaths before falling, corpselike and headlong, into unconsciousness.

 

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