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Just what? Was she right? I was surprised because she didn’t “act black”? What did that mean? How did you act black? Pretend your skin is dark? Why did we think of it as acting?
And here I was, caught in the classical liberal dilemma. Damn it, some of my best friends really were black. But maybe friendship was a different level of intimacy—I sure didn’t think of Nancy the same way I thought about Ed Beasley.
So was I disturbed? Put off by the revelation of her blackness? I didn’t like to think so. It didn’t fit with my self-image at all. But I had been shocked. I had acted differently than the way I would have if she had revealed she was half-Polish.
Self-image—did it come down to that? Was I more worried about how I looked than what I was doing?
There’s a real jerk inside all of us. Like most jerks, he has a simple job on this earth. Whenever you least expect it, whenever it’s most inconvenient, he steps out from behind the couch and puts an arm around your shoulder, so everybody knows he’s with you.
And the thing is, he is with you. He’s with all of us. He won’t go away and we are permanently stuck with him. And if we can’t make him funny, it becomes very sad indeed.
So I did the only thing I could. I laughed.
I laughed at pure, unprejudiced Billy Knight, caught in a blind-side trap he had made for himself. I
laughed at me, up to my neck in the outhouse and worried about how I was going to get my socks clean. I laughed at my good friend, the jerk inside, who had surprised me into seeing something about myself I didn’t know and wouldn’t have guessed.
And mostly I laughed because, now that I had seen the truth about myself, it really didn’t matter. If Nancy had been completely black, or Irish, or anything in between, it wouldn’t matter—now. Because she was the nicest and most interesting person I had met in six or seven years, and that was all that mattered.
Nancy watched me laugh with a polite coldness for about thirty seconds. Finally one corner of her mouth started to twitch, then the other. Then she opened her lovely mouth and let out such a hoot of laughter that it almost scared me.
And in just a minute we were both rolling on the tiny couch, laughing, arms around each other, gasping with laughter.
And after just a few moments of that, my hands suddenly became aware of where they were and what they were doing, and started doing other things.
And after several minutes of that, we quickly became aware of one more thing.
“The couch is too small,” Nancy whispered to me.
“No problem,” I told her. I picked her up in my arms, dizzy with the solid warmth of her weight.
“Down the hall, on the left,” she said, chewing on my ear. She put her tongue inside the ear and hummed softly.
I made it all the way down the hall and into the bedroom, but it was a close call.
By the time I got through the door Nancy was working on my neck, and standing up suddenly took a lot of thought. I stopped thinking about it and tumbled us both onto the bed.
Her skin felt silky and responsive to the touch and alive. The surface of her skin all over felt like it was humming gently. I could almost feel the pores purring.
In spite of my urgency I spent long minutes exploring her, marveling at the feel of that skin, at the rounds and hollows of her, and feeling her hands moving over me, too.
And at some point her breathing broke rhythm for just a moment and I heard her gasp.
Soon after that I stopped hearing and thinking.
In pitch darkness I woke up. My heart was hammering and my mouth was filled with a dry, bitter taste. A line of tears was still wet on the side of my face.
I had been walking with ghosts, listening as they explained their terrible disappointment in me. I knew I had done something unforgivably stupid. The ghosts explained it to me, told me all about it. But when I woke up I couldn’t remember what it was.
Nancy was lying with her back to me. It was a wonderful back, smooth, satiny, lean, and sleek. I couldn’t understand why looking at that back, remembering love with Nancy, could make me feel so bad.
Beyond Nancy was a small bedside table with a digital clock radio. The time flashed as I watched: 3:47.
What the hell was I doing here?
I’ve never been awake at 3:47 A.M. without asking that question. But now there seemed to be a really good reason for asking it.
What was I doing here? I was thinking with my gonads, pursuing pleasure when I should have been at work on a couple of nasty murders. Christ Almighty, my wife and child were buried just a few miles from here. What was I thinking about?
