“Well,” said Clarise Watson, “I was bom in Illinois and I moved to Connecticut when I was twelve, where a white man was very much taken with me. He saw to it that I was educated and that I learned how to dress properly and that I had proper dental work. He was grooming me to work in his house, which meant, among other things, being his mistress. His wife was this very cold white-haired woman who was difficult for everybody to get along with, including her husband. I’m told that he’d had other mistresses before. She knew about them and would tease him with them. She would get one of the mistresses’ undergarments and leave it under his pillow. Or a gift he had given his mistress would be on his desk in the morning. She was the one with all the money, and all the power, and she never wanted to let him forget it. Finally she would make him so nervous and anxious that he couldn’t have sex with his mistress. He’d keep trying, but his wife leaving all these little hints would undo him. She took more pleasure in handling it this way than in just throwing the girls out. She liked humiliating him.
“As I said, I was told all this. When it was my turn—he liked his mistresses to have just turned sixteen—he took me by the hand and led me out to this guest house they kept down by a stream. He took me inside and took my clothes off one layer at a time. I’ve never seen a man more appreciative of a woman’s body. He was crying, and it was with pleasure.
“He carried me over to the bed and set me down on it and started to kiss me, and then it happened. I had no idea what was going on. He just started making these funny noises in his chest and throat, and then his eyes sort of started bugging out. I tried to help him, but I didn’t know what to do. I ran up to the mansion to get somebody to help, and I was so terrified that I didn’t even care that I was naked. Then she saw me, his wife. She came running out of the house with a riding crop, and I kept screaming that her husband was dying. But instead of running down to the cabin to see if she could help him, she started beating me. She must have beaten me for fifteen minutes. Finally I just passed out. She had them put me in the bam, in the haymow. They were under strict orders not to help me in any way. I stayed there for four days. I had to drink from the same trough the horses did. I got the chills so badly one night that I had to steal a blanket from a horse who was cold, too. I never forgot the look in his eyes. He seemed to know what I was doing and forgave me for doing it.
“The husband didn’t live. The wife went to my family and told them that if they wanted to continue to work for her they’d have to send me to the city to live. She wanted to force me into prostitution.
“My father and mother had fourteen children. They had to look at the greater good—the well-being of thirteen children versus one child. I’m sure my mother never got over it, but they sent me anyway. I never did go into prostitution. I became a decorator for rich people. I even married a white man, but he could never forgive me for being a ‘high yellow’ as he always called me. Whenever he got drunk he beat me. He couldn’t forgive me for being part colored, and he couldn’t forgive himself for loving me.
“By then my brother had started boxing. I left my husband and traveled around with my brother until Rooney gave him that drink and killed him. And all this led me here, to try to kill Rooney.
“I’m sort of a disreputable woman, wouldn’t you say?”
She said she didn’t mind if he had an after-dinner cigar, so as they strolled along the river, he smoked.
On the dark water, the reflections of yellow and white city lights shimmered. Ducks floated and quacked. Rowboaters angled downstream toward the rush and roar and silver splash of the dam.
A soft breeze flowed over the grassy banks. Fireflies flickered and died. Lost in bushes, and happy to be lost, lovers giggled. An earnest young man in a straw boater sat on a park bench with a bored young woman and tried to impress her with his ukulele playing. An old immigrant sat in rags, despondent, staring at the shimmering water.
They walked upstream past the boat dock and the icehouses and pavilion where church ladies were carting off the last of the picnic baskets from a social.
“Have you even wanted a life like theirs?” Clarise asked Guild.
“I’m not sure.”
“You ever tried it?”
“Sort of, I suppose.”
“Sort of?”
“It’s not worth talking about.”
“Were you married?”
“For a time.”
“Were you happy?”
“That’s the part that’s not worth talking about.”
“I see.”
They walked some more. He finished his cigar, tossing the red eye of it into the black water.
Electric poles hummed and thrummed in the dark night along the graveled river road.
A white-nosed fawn stumbled out of undergrowth like a lost child, standing dazed in a circle of moonlight. Clarise went over to it and fell to her knees and hugged it as if she had borne it, and Guild was moved enough that he, too, went over and knelt and began petting the frightened animal.
At last came the fawn’s mother, a loose-fleshed animal that seemed, seeing them, both scared and angry. You could smell the night’s heat on the mother, and fecal matter.
The fawn disappeared back into the undergrowth with its mother.
Clarise and Guild went on their way.
They walked another mile. The river angled gently east. At its widest point the moon made the surface pure silver. Laughter came sharply from upriver, like gunshots, as two rowboats oared away from them.
They walked over and sat in the long grass on a ragged clay cliff above a backwash.
Clarise picked sunflowers, tucking one behind her ear. The other sunflowers she twirled, tossing them finally into the water below.
He was afraid to kiss her, but he kissed her anyway and she seemed quite pleased about it.
As they lay in the long grass, they could hear night birds and roaming dogs and distant cows. Nearer by, they could hear the soft lap of water on the shore and the wooden creak of rowboat oars and a young man singing a soft song, presumably to his girl.
He was scarcely aware of where his moments with Clarise were leading so suddenly.
“I can’t help the way I am,” Clarise said. “I don’t like most men, and it’s been a long time for me.”
“Will you roll me one of those?”
“Sure.”
“A lady oughtn’t smoke.”
“I suppose not.”
“But then a lady, a real lady, oughtn’t do what I just did.”
“Aren’t we a little old for oughtn’ts?”
She laughed. “Speak for yourself.”
He rolled the cigarettes and got them going red in the dark night. He gave her a cigarette and then lay down again with her. They’d put their clothes back on in case somebody came along.
“You seem like a troubled man, Guild.”
He did not want to talk about the little girl and spoil everything for them. He said, “And you seem like a troubled woman.”
They said nothing for a long time. They just listened to the soft lapping of water on the shore and the reedy sound of breeze through the long grasses.
“I enjoyed myself, Guild.”
“So did I.”
“I guess I don’t care if you think I’m a whore or not.”
“I don’t.”
“That’s what most white people think of us.”
“You want me to tell you what most white people think of me?”
She laughed again. “Look at that moon. You ever wonder what’s going on up there, in the parts that look like continents?”
“Sure. I wonder about that a lot.”
“Wouldn’t it be funny if there were people up there and they were just like us?”
“No,” Guild said. “I hope they’re not. I hope they’re very, very different.”
“In what way?”
He sighed. “I hope they don’t have politicians the way we do, and I hope they don’t let people go hungry, and I hope they don’t kill children.”
He felt her shudder. “Kill children? That’s a terrible thing to think of.”
“Yes,” Guild said. “It’s the worst thing you can think of.”
“Then stop thinking about it.”
She drew him back to her then, and the wonderful softness and heat and moisture of her mouth pressed to his again.