SEVEN
April 1954
Jilo leaned across the table, her breasts exposed and hanging down over it. They had filled out some since Guy first started the portrait, but he hadn’t seemed to notice.
She wore a tatty shawl tied around her waist. It wasn’t hers, just one Guy had borrowed for the painting. From whom, she didn’t know. Guy was real good at talking women into—and out of—things. She didn’t look at him; he’d told her not to. It was easier not to. She kept her gaze fixed on the dark bands in the grain of the tabletop. In her peripheral vision, she could see the bottom of a vase Guy had filled with flowers. Not a gift, just part of the scenery.
She was tired—he wanted her tired, said the painting needed it. Her feet cramped, but he insisted that she balance on the balls of her feet for reasons of light and composition. Again, the painting needed it.
“Jilo,” he said, her name a rebuke on his lips. “Stop fidgeting.”
“I’m sorry,” she mumbled. She’d just come off of a twelve-hour shift at the hospital, where she worked in the colored wing. The Greelie Hospital was really a single building, but still most folk referred to it in the plural, as “the Greelies,” since the white and colored wings were separated by a corridor. She’d walked that corridor at least a hundred times in her shift, so her feet already felt like they’d been beaten with a board.
Mary had found Jilo the job at the Greelies, but Mary herself had been forced to return home to Missouri not more than a week after graduation. Her mother had suffered a heart attack that had rendered her incapable of seeing to herself and Mary’s younger brother. Jilo had been left on her own to catch up on the procedures and practices the hospital’s hiring manager already thought she knew. On parting, Mary and she had promised to stay in touch, but no more than a handful of letters had passed between them through the post. Mary, Jilo knew, had her hands full. Jilo, well, she didn’t have much she felt she could share without shame.
“I’m worn out, Guy. I just need to rest a bit,” she said. “Can’t we do this another time?”
He sighed. “I’m not sure you appreciate what I’m attempting here. I’m not sure you appreciate my work.”
Jilo bit her tongue, but she felt her expression harden, a layer of anger varnishing the exhaustion.
“There,” he said, “that’s better. Concentrate.”
He thought she didn’t appreciate his work. Hell, it was Guy who didn’t give a lick about all the work she did. She spent six days a week emptying bedpans, cleaning bedsores, and lifting patients who couldn’t manage to shift themselves. This man didn’t even understand the concept of real work. And he didn’t know what it meant to pay a bill either. It was her work that paid their rent for this rat-ridden hovel. It was her work that fed them. It was her work that paid for the damned paints and canvas he was using now.
There was a quick rap on the door, and it opened before either of them could respond. “It came. The letter came,” Guy’s friend Charles said, storming into the room, waving a white envelope around.
“Please,” Jilo said, straightening up and turning her back to the men.
“Come on, girl,” Guy said, “you don’t have anything Charles hasn’t seen before.”
“Maybe not, but he hasn’t seen it on me.” She unknotted the shawl and whipped it around her body. After grabbing her nurse’s uniform off the bed, she slipped behind the changing screen she had insisted on procuring, even though Guy had made fun of her modesty. Lately he found a lot of things about her worthy of contempt. “You still got too much girl in you,” he’d taken to saying, “not enough woman.” It was true that she wasn’t as experienced or worldly as he was. She hadn’t realized it at first, but Guy was a good decade older than her, and though that didn’t matter to her, lately it seemed to matter to him. Every time she spoke up—about anything, from the weather to where he’d spent the night—he would remind her of her immaturity.
Guy and Charles had been friends since the war. They’d met in the army, and it was Charles’s presence in Atlanta that had prompted Guy to come for an extended visit. A visit that had culminated in her leaving the Joneses’ boarding home going on a year ago and moving into this tenement with Guy. The building was filled with musicians and artists. And whores. Nobody cared that she and Guy weren’t married. The building’s owner didn’t ask too many questions as long as you didn’t get too far behind on the rent.
She had thought their love would be enough. In those first few months, she would press her body closer to his whenever she heard the rodents moving in the walls. Then came the nights when she’d come home from the hospital to find their room dark, when she would flip on the overhead light and stand in the doorway as the last of the cockroaches scurried for cover. Until then, she had never thought she could miss the Joneses’ house. But it wasn’t only the boarding house she missed. She missed the pastor and his wife as well. Yes, she missed them. She would like to go pay them a visit, but shame held her back. They’d ask too many questions that would require too many lies.
She flung the shawl up over the top of the screen.
“What does it say?” Guy asked. She had no idea who this letter was from, but she could hear the tension in his voice. This was something that mattered to him. Really mattered to him.
“They want us,” Charles said. “They want both of us.” The word “both” was spoken with great emphasis.
She buttoned the uniform and stuck her head out around the screen. “Who wants you? For what?” she asked as she stepped up behind Guy, who was now holding the letter at arm’s length, looking at it like he couldn’t quite believe what was written there. Charles’s eyes rose as she spoke, but then passed over her. She glanced over her shoulder to realize he was focused on the shawl she’d been wearing. There was a sly smile on his lips. Evidently he knew who owned it. Jilo asked herself if she cared to learn that woman’s identity. No, she decided, but she did want to know what was in the letter Guy still held. She reached for it, but he snatched it back.
He held it to his chest, as jealously and as guiltily as if it were a love letter. She slid her hands down to her hips and tilted her head. “Who,” she said, angry and tired of his games, “wants you?”
He slipped the letter back into its envelope and handed it to Charles. “A gallery,” Guy said, squatting down and opening his arms like he expected her to come running into them. She held her place. “A real one where they appreciate real art. Not like the little crap holes in this town.”
“So,” she said, determined to draw the whole story out of him with as few equivocations as possible, “I take it this gallery is not in Atlanta.”
“No,” he said, shifting from one foot to the other. “It isn’t. It’s in New York.”
“Ah,” she said, nodding. “Well, of course you’ll be going.”
A look of relief flooded his face. His shoulders relaxed, letting his arms fall to his sides. “This is big, Jilo. I’ve been working for this all my life.”
“I understand,” she said. “How long will you be up north?”
He focused on the floor by her feet. “If things go well, I won’t be coming back.”
“Then I’ll go with you,” she said, though the look on his face told her all she needed to know.
His head jerked as he cast a glance at the silent Charles. An embarrassed smile curved his lips when he looked back at her. “I can’t ask that of you, sweetheart. It’s a different world up there. You’re a small-town girl at heart, and New York, well, I’m afraid you won’t take to the big city. Besides, you have a job. Your whole life is here.”
Jilo flung her arms into the air and spun around. “Yes. How could I possibly give this up?” She noticed Charles slinking backward toward the door. “That’s right. You go on. You get the hell out of here.” He slipped through the door, and she rushed over and flung her full weight at it to make sure it slammed behind him.
She turned on Guy. “When?” she demanded. “When are you leaving me?”
He lowered his face, trying not to look at her. “Couple of days, I reckon.”
She nodded, more to herself than to him. “You reckon.” She knelt by the side of the bed and tugged out her suitcase, the one she’d brought from Savannah to Atlanta, the one she’d carried from the Joneses’ boarding house here. She set it on the bed and undid its straps, pausing for only a moment after she opened it. “If I told you I was pregnant, would you stay?” She looked toward him, heavy tears brimming her eyes. “Would you take me with you?”
He turned his back toward her. “You wouldn’t lie to me just to hold on to me. You wouldn’t do that.”
She sighed and realized she was trembling. Forcing herself to regain composure, she wiped the tears from her cheeks. “No, I guess I wouldn’t.” She opened the battered chifferobe that had come with the apartment and scooped out the dresses she rarely wore now that she spent most days in her nurse’s uniform. She didn’t bother to fold them neatly; she just dropped them into the case. Next went the jewelry box that held the few pieces that hadn’t disappeared over the past months. She’d pretended not to notice as one after the other went missing. It didn’t really matter whether he’d given her purloined baubles to his other women or hocked them for money. Either way they were lost to her. She tossed the box on top of the dresses and closed and secured the suitcase’s lid.
She reached under the table to pull out the shoes she’d kicked off beneath it, then sat on the edge of the bed to put them back on. She stood and tugged the case from the bed. It was heavy, but not nearly as heavy as her heart. “The rent is covered till the end of the week. You need to clear out by Friday, unless you’re prepared to pay for another.” She lifted the case and walked to the door, praying with each step he’d call out to stop her. But he didn’t. She reached out and turned the brass doorknob. She opened the door, but she paused for a moment at the threshold, staring at his broad shoulders.
He turned. “You take care of yourself,” he said.
She nodded and stepped into the hall. The damnedest thing, she realized, was that even after this, after everything he’d done, she’d go to her grave loving the man. She pulled the door closed behind her. “I’ll do that,” she said quietly. Her free hand slipped to her stomach. “I’ll take care of both of us.”