The Darling by Russell Banks
“I should be asking that of you,” I said.
“Me? I live here. Welcome to our humble abode,” he said, and then added, “Missus Sundiata.”
Mrs. Sundiata? I laughed, as if he’d been uncannily witty, and quickly asked Carol, “Where’s Bettina? How old is she now?”
“Nine and a half, in fourth grade. Amazing, huh? She’s at my mom’s. She stays there ’cause we both work nights on Fridays and Saturdays. Me at The Pequod and Zack in his cab. We only just came in ahead of you,” she said. “You hungry? We were gonna order in Chinese.”
I said sure, and Carol kicked off her shoes and headed for the kitchen, and I followed. Zack hit the remote and went back to his game.
As soon as we were out of his hearing, I said, “So he’s actually living here? With you and Bettina?”
“Yeah. It’s kind of weird, I guess. But we’re okay together. For now, anyway. What do you want, fish or meat or what?” She pulled a Chinese restaurant flyer from a stack of take-out menus on the table by the phone. The kitchen smelled of fresh paint and looked clean and well kept. More so, certainly, than when I lived here.
“I don’t care. Anything. You know me.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I know you.”
She dialed and ordered, and when she hung up the phone I asked her how long she and Zack had been together. “As a couple, I mean.”
“Only about six weeks. Since he got out.”
“Out?”
“I’ll let Zack tell you the whole story. It’s pretty complicated. But he was in prison over in Plymouth, the federal prison, sort of a minimum-security place.”
“Prison?”
“He’ll tell you. Six months was all. Anyhow, one day out of the blue he calls me up, and we talked, and then I started going out there to visit him. He didn’t have anyone else to visit him, and I felt sorry for him. Even though him and you ran out on me like you did. But he explained all that. I got over it.”
“I… I’m sorry about that, Carol. At the time—”
“Yeah, it’s okay. I’m over it. Anyhow, we started writing letters and all, and before you know it we’d gotten real close and all. So when he was released, it seemed sort of natural for him to move in with me. He’s been real sweet. He helped fix up the apartment and everything. He even got his old job back driving a cab. Different company, of course. The other company went out of business, so nobody remembered how he ran out on them. When you and him went to Africa back then.”
I put my hand on her shoulder. “You do know Zack lied to me about that. We never really had to leave, or at least I didn’t. But I thought—”
Zack suddenly appeared beside me. “Fucking Yankees,” he said and grabbed a fresh can of beer from the refrigerator. “You filling in the details for ‘Dawn’?” he asked Carol.
“You tell me your story, Zack, and I’ll tell you mine,” I said.
He sat down at the table. “You’ll show me yours if I show you mine? Sounds fair. Except I already know yours.”
“C’mon, Zack, be straight with me.” I sat across from him and gave him a hard stare. Carol stood behind me with a friendly hand on my shoulder. “How do you know my story?” I asked him.
“A guy I met knows you.”
“And who might that be?”
“Okay, babe, I’ll tell you everything,” he said. He had done very well in Accra buying and selling Ghanaian arts and antiquities. He’d bought himself a house, set up two galleries and a warehouse for selling work wholesale to galleries in the U.S. and Europe. A year ago he’d come across a private collection of very old gold and bronze masks and plaques and other artifacts from Benin owned by a retired British army colonel who had stayed on in Ghana after independence. The colonel had died, and his widow had asked Zack to sell the collection abroad. For his trouble he was to receive a third of the selling price. “This was a major collection, man. Museum-quality stuff. Off the scale. Probably worth two, two point five million at auction. But you’d have to show provenance, pay the auction house a fat commission, pay New York and federal taxes, all that. By the time I got my piece, it’d be a small piece. Besides,” he said, “I didn’t have an export license and couldn’t move the stuff out of the country myself without a Ghanaian partner, who’d probably want half of whatever I got. So I guess I had what you’d call a Maltese Falcon moment.”
He had painted over the gold and bronze artifacts—masks, wall hangings, statuary, and pendants—with gray, latex-based housepaint that could be removed without damaging the objects. He carried the objects to the States in his luggage and a beat-up cardboard box tied with heavy twine. Claiming that the lot was made up of cheap souvenirs not to be resold, he declared its value at six hundred dollars, and thought he’d made it, until the customs officer pulled out a pocketknife and scraped the paint off the chin of one of the gold masks. Zack’s family had refused to help him or even see him, and since all his property and cash were in Accra, he couldn’t raise bail and spent a month in jail in Charlestown awaiting trial. He had to accept a public defender and got sent to Plymouth for six months. “If I’d had a decent lawyer, I’d have gotten a suspended sentence.”
“If you hadn’t been greedy, you’d never have been arrested,” I said.
The doorbell rang, and Carol hurried off to meet the delivery man at the bottom of the stairs. “End of story,” Zack said. “It could’ve been worse. It was mostly white guys convicted of white-collar crimes, short-termers in for tax evasion, kiting checks, insurance fraud. Small fish, most of them. People were catching up on their reading and taking mail-order courses in art appreciation.”
“What about Carol?” I asked.
“What about her? She’s been great, man. My port in a storm. She came out to see me every week, when no one in my family would bother making the trip. When I got out, she picked me up and brought me here and said I could stay with her and Bettina till I got back on my feet. The rest is history, man.”
“You started sleeping together, I suppose.”
“First thing, man. You’re not jealous, are you?”
“A little. Yeah.”
Carol returned with the food and spread it out on the table, and the three of us ate and drank beer. After a few moments, I asked Zack again how he knew my story. I wasn’t convinced he did know it. When I left Accra I’d not told a soul where I was headed. I’d never written from Monrovia to him or any of his friends or mine and didn’t believe that anyone who knew me in Liberia also knew him.
“Actually, I figured you’d gone back to the States. A-mer-i-ka. But then I met an old friend of yours,” he said. “In Plymouth. One of the inmates. He claims to know you and your husband well. Very well.”
“Who? What’s his name?”
“Charlie. But he hates being called that. Charles is his name. I used to call him Chuck, just to piss him off.”
“Charles?”
“Charles Taylor,” he said. “Remember him? He got sent up about a month before I got out, so we weren’t exactly buddies. But I pegged him right away for an African, and I thought maybe he’s from Ghana. You can always tell an African black guy from an American black guy, even without hearing him. They walk differently. Turns out he’s Liberian. And turns out he knows your old man very well. And knows you pretty good, too. You ever sleep with him?”
“No! For Christ’s sake, Zack!”
“Too bad. He lied. African guys, man, they want you to think they’ve fucked every white woman they ever said hello to. Anyhow, he told me a whole lot of other stuff, which I assume is true. Stuff about you and your kids and all, and about your husband, Woodrow, who Charlie thinks dropped a dime on him so he’d get nailed by the feds when he got to JFK. True?”
“It’s more complicated than that,” I said. “More pathetic, actually.”
Carol said, “I think it’s great you have kids, Don. I bet you’re a terrific mother.”
“Not so terrific,” I said.
“You know, you are a damned attractive woman,?
I looked at Carol. He was right about her, at least. She smiled, as if agreeing with Zack—about me, anyhow. A cascade of memories washed over me, memories of Carol when we first found solace and simple pleasure in each other’s arms. In different ways, even though most of my injuries had been internal and self-inflicted, we’d both in a sense been battered women. She’d been victimized by men generally; I’d been victimized by ideology. In each other, we’d both for the first time found someone we could trust. More than anything else, simple tenderness and intimacy were what we wanted then. We were too weak and shaken to be alone, and too wounded and confused to be with another person. Especially with a man. I’d invalidated and tried to overthrow all the old forms of tenderness and intimacy between men and women—missionary-position sexual relations, monogamy, fidelity, state-recognized and -regulated marital roles and responsibilities, even childcare—and afterwards found myself with nothing to replace those forms. I’d deliberately set out to shatter in mere months a social structure that had taken fifty thousand years to harden. It was like jumping from a ship that was in no danger of sinking and finding myself alone in a tiny rowboat in the middle of the ocean.
I’d chosen to abandon that ship, but Carol had been tossed off hers. The captain and crew had left her on a desert island, a castaway. One night I rowed solemnly, hopelessly, to shore, and there we were, the two of us, marooned together. I figured her for a working girl right off, barely twenty, heavy eye makeup, miniskirt, and fishnet stockings—the whole uniform. She stood at the end of the bar nursing a drink made with grenadine, trying to look exotic and available for a reasonable price to the crowd of half-drunk construction workers and fishermen bonding beneath the TV screens and around the pool table. A blow job in the parking lot, a quickie in the men’s room with the door locked, or an hour in a motel out on Route 28—it’s all the same to her, I figured, merely a way, the only way available, to pay the rent and buy food for herself and her kid and maybe get high enough to ignore for another day the way she makes her living. Until, of course, the drugs turn on her, and the way she makes her living becomes the only way she can get the money to get high. I could see by her stoned gaze, her flattened, self-amused affect, that she was on the verge of that turnaround. In six months, I thought, she’ll be doing tricks strictly to get high.
It was nine o’clock. I offered her twenty dollars to come back to my apartment with me, and she said, “Sure, why not?” At the apartment, we drank a bottle of cheap red wine and quickly found ourselves talking like friends from high school, and never got around to having sex that night. She was bright and funny and warm, and at a time when I hated myself for having failed to save the world, she made me feel that I could at least save her.
Her daughter was at a sister’s place, she said, and was okay till midnight, when the sister, who worked the night shift at the clam cannery, went to work. At eleven-thirty, I invited Carol to move in and share my apartment, take the larger of the two bedrooms for herself and her daughter. I’d carry the rent and cover food and other costs until she got herself cleaned up and found a job. She accepted, and shortly after midnight she and Bettina moved in. Two nights later, Carol and I were lovers. In a week, she had a part-time job as a waitress that after a month became full-time.
And look at her now, I thought, a free and independent woman who’s saving someone else. She’s become what I tried to be and couldn’t.
Carol, Zack, and I sat up late drinking beer, smoking pot, and elaborately talking around the difficult question of who was going to end up in bed with Carol. We played an old Neil Young tape over and over, seventies ballads and hymns that celebrated reckless abandon, which didn’t help change the unstated subject. We wandered back and forth between the kitchen and the living room, feigning interest in how Carol had redecorated the place. The walls and woodwork had all been repainted in new colors like mauve and taupe and lapis. My old room was now Bettina’s. The Che Guevara and John Brown posters had been replaced by New Kids on the Block and Paul McCartney in a band called Wings.
Finally, we three found ourselves standing together at the door to the bedroom Carol shared with Zack. The double bed was unmade, and a harried working mother’s clothes draped from chairs and the dresser.
“Sorry about the mess,” Carol said. “Zack’s such a neatnik and takes care of most of the place, but he refuses to pick up after me in the bedroom. It’s the one thing we fight about.”
Zack crossed in front of us and flopped down in the middle of the bed. “C’mere, you,” he said.
“Who?” Carol asked.
“Both of you.”
“Zack,” I said. “I’m not your type, remember? And you’re not mine.” Carol walked over, and sat down on the edge of the bed. Zack began to stroke her bare arm.
“Yeah, but you’re Carol’s type,” he said. “And she’s yours.”
Carol and I looked at each other. When the object of your past desire is placed in front of you like that, sexual nostalgia can be very powerful. There are so many vague, lingering memories of having once been satisfied and so few specific details that you want to revisit the source.
Zack reached over to the bedside table and lighted a chunky blue candle. I hit the wall switch, and he said, “That’s better. Now, c’mon over here with us.”
I stayed put by the door. “Is a threesome what you’re after?”
“I wouldn’t mind. But if you’re not into that, it’s okay by me. There’s other possibilities.”
“What about you, Carol?”
She shrugged. Zack slowly unzipped the back of her dress, and she looked down and smiled coyly.
“Maybe you’d like to watch me and Carol,” Zack said. “Or maybe you’d like me to watch you and Carol. Like I said, there’s other possibilities. I’ve never seen two women make love before. In real life, I mean.”
“Real life,” I said. “Is this real life?”
“It’s not a movie, man,” he said. “Come on over here. You know you want to.”
I took one step, then two, and then I was standing beside Carol on the bed. Zack slid over to make room. I sat down, my ears buzzing like a teenager’s, and placed one hand over hers. With my other hand, I brushed her hair off her shoulder and touched her throat. She turned to face me, closed her eyes, and kissed me on the lips.
And the rest? Well, you know the rest.
No, that’s not true. You don’t know the rest. You don’t know that Zack and I both made love to Carol. You don’t know that while he fucked her I leaned back against the headboard and watched them and touched myself and for the first time in my life was swallowed whole by sexual pleasure. I left my body behind and merged with theirs and had no thoughts, no awareness of my mind or body. You don’t know that afterwards I felt deep, nearly inexplicable gratitude to Zack and Carol, as if they had gone through a terrible, mind- and body-searing ordeal solely for me, so that I would not have to endure it myself. Though, of course, unlike me, all they had done was take their pleasure.
THE NEXT MORNING, after a breakfast as casual and companionable as if we had been sharing the kitchen for months, Carol drove over to her mother’s apartment in the East End to pick up Bettina, leaving me and Zack for the first time alone in the apartment. I was washing the dishes from breakfast and the night before; he sat at the table smoking a cigarette and reading the sports section of the morning paper. He seemed content. He knew that what happened last night was going to continue for a while, at least until something unforeseen, a factor outside the equation, stopped it. Instead of waiting for Carol and me to betray him in secret and then, after a period of deception, displace him, Zack had right away made me a player in his sexual relations with her. I hadn’t seen that coming. He liked having me watch them make love. It put him in control of the sexual aspect of my relationship with Carol, which was the only part of it that had threat
Zack looked up from the paper and smiled. “So, babe, do you think you’ll go back to Liberia?”
“I have three sons and a husband there.”
“That doesn’t mean you’ll go back, though.”
“No. But I will, as soon as it’s allowed.”
“By whom?”
“The president, Samuel Doe.” I gave him the short version of the events leading up to my departure from Liberia, including the reasons for Charles’s flight and Woodrow’s brief arrest. Mention of Charles brought a wide grin to Zack.
“So my man Charlie is very cool after all,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s true, he skimmed over a million bucks from some fund over there? Him and your husband?”
“Yes.”
“That bastard. I thought he was lying to me. I thought it was all a con.”
“What was?”
“He told me he’s willing to turn a million bucks over to anyone who can spring him from prison and get him out of the country. He’s a very political guy, you know, a guy with large freedom-fighter ideas and big ambitions.”
“No, I don’t know.”
“Yeah, well, he is. A genuine comrade. I was telling him about our years in SDS and Weather, which was naturally of great interest to him. And at some point I told him how Weather had sprung Timothy Leary out of a California prison and got him all the way to Algeria, and Charlie goes nuts for it.”
“Goes nuts for what?” I leaned against the sink and faced him. I wasn’t sure where this was leading, but the conversation made me anxious. I was reasonably certain that Charles was smarter than Zack and probably more cynical, too.
“For having Weather break him out. Doing a Tim Leary. I tell him Weather doesn’t even exist anymore, it’s just a few people still more or less underground, like you, and that’s it. Then he says he’s got a million bucks U.S. stashed in an offshore bank that he’ll turn over to anyone who successfully gets him out of prison and out of the country. He’s got some kind of deal with Ghaddafi, but he’s got to get to Libya, where there’s all these training camps for African freedom fighters looking to liberate their homelands.” Zack looked past me and out the kitchen window to the cloudless, morning sky. “You know, we can do this, babe. You and me.”