Many years later, when we were fifty-five years old, Charles William called me on the phone to tell me he was dying. After he told me that, we decided to talk all night. We talked from four in the afternoon until seven. Then I called him back and we talked until twelve. We talked about every single thing we had ever done or could remember. He told me things I had forgotten and I told him things he had forgotten. But some things were still vivid in both our memories. My green silk dress, the Siobhan McKenna recording of the Molly Bloom soliloquy from Ulysses, stripping wallpaper on Dex in the June heat, and every moment of the week Klane Marengo killed herself.
“I’ll never forget you pushing Ariane down in the side yard. Jesus, Dee, I thought your daddy would kill us both.”
“That was the night before. Klane didn’t call until the next day.”
“I always think of them together. When I drove up you were tearing around in some tacky little aqua dress with your boobs hanging out and your daddy was right behind you. Then he was yelling at me to leave and Ariane was on the ground by the oak tree. I’d never seen white people act like that. It was better than a play.”
“I only gave in because you were there. If I’d been alone I could have gotten away.”
“Why did that bother you?”
“I was afraid he’d say something to hurt your feelings. I was afraid he’d say something about you being gay.”
“Oh, Dee, upper-class southern men didn’t mind gays back then. We weren’t any threat to them. Didn’t you know that? You were trying to protect me?”
“I think I was. I remember it that way.” I started giggling. “What I can remember. I was pretty drunk.”
“We were drunk a lot back then.”
“We were drunk every day.”
“Do you regret it?”
“Hell, no. It was how we escaped. We never would have gotten free without it. It was the gate, the open sesame. But I don’t do it anymore. It’s like swallowing razor blades.”
“I still do it.”
“I know you do.” We were silent then. I wasn’t going to say, You’re killing yourself. “I love you, Charles William,” I said instead. “I wish to hell you wouldn’t die.”
“Maybe I won’t. It might be a mistake. I think it’s a mistake.”
“You could get a heart transplant. I just read this article in The New Yorker about the team that harvests the hearts. It’s fascinating.”
“I couldn’t do that, Dee. I’m too fastidious to have someone else’s heart. Someone I don’t know.”
“You’re right. It could be anybody’s. Jesus, think of the possibilities. Some big dumb born-again Christian from Missouri. Someone we’d hate.”
“I read about this man in Minnesota who got mad because he got a black man’s heart. He’s suing the hospital.”
“That’s about par for the course. Why would anyone mind a black man’s heart? Some huge sweet black heart beating out the rhythms of another continent. Nobody in the United States wants to have any fun anymore. What a bunch of pussies.”
“My doctor won’t believe I’m not afraid to die. He doesn’t understand me, Dee, but I fascinate him, I think. He tried to talk me into a transplant. He was begging me to do it at one point.”
“I’m not afraid of dying anymore. I believe in DNA, Charles William. That’s the only immortality.”
“I believe in art, Dee. Five hundred years is a long time. I’m tiling the entrance to Eula’s old house. I wish you could see it. It’s like a mosque. I’m putting mandalas everywhere.”
“Don’t die, Charles William. Please don’t die on me.”
“I’ll try not to. I probably won’t. I think I’ll get a better report tomorrow.”
But of course he didn’t and his great heart heaved and stopped and now I can’t call him up and read him this and see if it makes him laugh and, as the poet wrote, that makes all this difference.
“The deep blue sky was flecked with clouds of a blue deeper than the fundamental blue of intense cobalt, and others of a clearer blue. … In the blue depth the stars were sparkling, greenish, yellow, white, rose, brighter, flashing more like jewels . . . opals you might call them, emeralds, lapis, rubies, sapphires.” Vincent Van Gogh, Aries, 1888