Walter Mosley - The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

“I love you, Robyn,” Ptolemy said as a reply to words spoken so long ago. Death was coming, but Love was there too. Robyn was a far-off descendant, an adopted child, a woman he might have loved as a woman if he were fifty years younger and she twenty years older.

Pain tittered in his knucklebones and burbled in his knees. His joints were like music, like transistor radios calling out from under his skin. The knock at the door was a new strain, another musician deciding to jam with him. He waited for the knock to come again before getting up, going to the bedroom, pulling the bureau drawer open, and retrieving his .25-caliber pistol.

He walked to the door purposefully, like a soldier marching into battle.

“Who is it?” he asked in a mild voice.

“Shirley Wring,” she answered sweetly.

Changing his mood as quickly as an infant child distracted by a sudden sound, Ptolemy stuffed the little gun into his pocket, threw the four locks, and opened the door.

She wore an orange dress and largish, bone-colored beads. Her half-blind eyes glistened behind glittering glasses. Her short hair was done recently, forming a cap that wrapped in arcs down under her ears and got curly over her forehead. Her tennis shoes were white and sensible. And instead of the red bag, she carried a pink paper box in her hands.

“Can I come in?” the small woman asked.

Ptolemy reached out to take the box and then backed away for her to enter. As she went past, he could see the red bag hanging from her left shoulder. For some reason this made him happy.

“Come on in an’ sit,” he said. “Can I get you somethin’? Water? Tea?”

Shirley Wring set her bag on the couch and took the box from Ptolemy.

“You sit down and rest and I’ll put together some coffee an’ fudge for us,” she said.

“I’ll be right with ya,” he promised. “First I’ma get sumpin’ in the bedroom.”

He put the pistol back in the drawer and took out a smaller item, which he placed in his shirt pocket.

You okay, Ptolemy?” Shirley asked when he sat down heavily at the kitchen table.

“Ain’t no way a man could be almost ninety-two an’ okay at the same time,” he answered. “But I’m as good as a man like that can get. That’s for sure.”

Shirley lit a match to start the burner under the kettle and then she came to sit across the table from him. Her eyes were watery and slightly out of focus, he could tell.

He must have frowned, because she asked, “What?”

“Oh . . . nuthin’. I was just thinkin’ ’bout gettin’ old.”

“Once you get our age,” she said, “I guess that’s what we always be thinkin’ ’bout.”

“How old are you, Miss Wring?”

“Seventy-four last March.”

“I was almost a man when you was born. I got old in these bones make you seem like a wildcat on the prowl.”

“Old is old,” she said, and smiled, enjoying a moment that she didn’t see coming.

“No, baby,” Ptolemy said, wondering at the words coming out from his mind. “No. That’s what I was thinkin’ about. You know, I got every tooth I was born with except for one canine that got knocked out when I fell off’a the ice truck one day when Peter Brock took a turn too fast. That was sumpin’ else. I looked at that bloody tooth in my hand and I knew I was not nevah gonna work on that ice truck again. Not nevah. Damn.

“But you know, I nevah had a cavity, an’ I nevah needed no glasses.”

“And here I got nuthin’ but dentures,” Shirley said, “an’ I got to squint just to see you across the table.”

“Yeah, but just a few weeks ago I didn’t even have half a mind. If you told me the apple was red an’ then you right away asked me what you just said, I wouldn’t remembah. I’d stutter and think about my wallet, or Reggie, or maybe I wouldn’t even’a understood the question.”

Shirley’s smile slowly faded. Her eyes retained their blind fondness, though.

“Yeah,” Ptolemy continued. “I sold my body to the Devil an’ I can only hope that he don’t care ’bout no old niggah’s soul.”

“Don’t say that.”

“What?”

“That word.”

“That word begins with a n ?”

“Yes. That word.”

Ptolemy smiled at this genteel black woman. The kettle whistled and she got up to make filtered coffee and arrange her homemade fudge on a white plate.

When she was through preparing and serving she took her seat again, but now she wouldn’t look her host in the eye.

“What’s wrong, Miss Wring?”

“I didn’t mean to snap at you,” she said.

“Snap? Girl, all I got to say is that if you call that snappin’, then you must think kissin’ makes babies an’ a argument makes a war.”

Shirley smiled and looked up. Ptolemy could see the young girl in her features and for a moment Shirley and Robyn and Sensia came together in one.

“You’re hot,” she said.

It was only then that he realized that she’d reached across the table to take his hand.

“Devil’s medicine,” he explained.

“Why you keep talkin’ ’bout the Devil, Mr. Grey?”

“When you met me, I was, was confused, right?”

“A l’il bit.”

“A lot. But then I went to this doctor, and now it’s like I’m a whiz kid on the radio. I know everything I ever known. I know things that I didn’t know fifty years ago when they happened. Who else but the Devil gonna give you all that?”

“The medicine make you hot?”

“Yeah. It sure does. Tell me sumpin’, Shirley.” He squeezed her hand and she smiled at the tabletop.

“What’s that?”

“Who are you?” It was a question he had never asked before. Naked and unadorned, it was like something Coy would have asked a young girl he was courting.

“I ain’t nobody.”

“Now, I know that ain’t true ’cause I can see you right there in front’a me. I feel your fingers, see your pretty face.”

“Mr. Grey,” she complained.

“You know, Shirley, I wouldn’t push you if I was a young man. Back a long time ago we would’a been up in a bed before I asked you ’bout your favorite color or what you do when they ain’t nobody else around.”

“Please, Mr. Grey, Ptolemy, don’t say them kinda things to me. I’m a shy woman.”

“Men like me like shy women. We see ’em an’ wanna tickle ’em, you know?”

“I was born in Tulsa,” Shirley Wring said. She brought out her other hand to hold his. “But there was a depression and so my daddy took us to California. We got to a rich man’s estate outside’a Santa Barbara . . . lookin’ for work. But instead he let us live in a big cabin by the ocean that was on his land.”

“What your father do for that man?” Ptolemy brought out his other hand.

“Oh,” Shirley said, “he didn’t do nuthin’. That rich man was a Communist and he just wanted to do somethin’ nice for his fellow man.

“We lived there for ’leven years. My first memories is the sound of waves and things that washed up from the sea. My first boyfriend was a little blond-headed boy named Leo who lived in the big house with his sister. They were the rich man’s grandson and granddaughter. We’d swim in the ocean every day, almost.”

Shirley smiled, her eyes gazing backward in time. Ptolemy knew that look. He’d spent many years watching his own youth. He had stared so hard that the vision blurred and the memories were shut away.

“That’s wonderful,” he said. “But how did you eat or get the other things you needed?”

“Mr. Halmont, that was the old white man, he gave us food and anything we asked for. My mother made our clothes and my father drove one of Mr. Halmont’s old cars.”

“Eleven years,” Ptolemy marveled. “Eleven years livin’ by the ocean an’ you didn’t even have to lift a finger. Did they make you go to school?”

“Leo and his sister had a tutor, and they let me sit with them. We studied in English and in French, but don’t ask me to speak French. I lost that tongue a long time ago.”

Ptolemy rubbed his fingertips across the back of Shirley’s left hand. Their skins were wrinkled and brittle, two tones of deep, earthy brown. Ptolemy’s heart stuttered, partly because of a feeling that he’d forgotten, and also because he sensed a tragedy.

“Why you leave that house on the beach?” he asked.

Shirley shook her head but said nothing.

Their hands moved together, tangled, Ptolemy thought, like seals playing in the surf of Shirley Wring’s long-ago ocean yard.

“My father and Mr. Halmont used to talk about the world of communism. Every night Daddy would come home and tell us about how in Russia men was just men and there wasn’t no difference in the races or anything.”

“And your father believed that nonsense?”

“My mother was scared, but finally one day Daddy decided to move to L.A. and get a job in a defense factory and work with Mr. Halmont to organize the workers—black and white.”

“Did they kill him?” Ptolemy asked.

Shirley put her forehead against his hand and nodded.

They left the sour taste of their talk and went into the living room. When they were seated on Robyn’s couch, Ptolemy took Shirley’s hands in his, pressing his fingers against her palm.

“What’s this?” she said.

Looking into her hand, she saw the emerald ring she’d left with Robyn.

“Will you be my friend for the rest of our life, double-u ara eye en gee?”

She kissed his lips and threw her arms around his neck. It was the embrace he’d always run after. It was his only chance and his downfall. There was nothing like it in the world.

“You’re hot, Ptolemy.”

“Woman like you in my arms, it’s a wonder I don’t burn up.”

“I like it, because I’m always so cold,” she said.

They sat back, facing each other as well as their ancient bodies would allow. Their arms and hands were tangled up together, their shoes were touching.

“What about you?” Shirley asked.

“You mean you wanna know who I am?”

She nodded and smiled and caressed his cheek with her right hand, the hand that wore their ring.

“That there’s a hard question,” he said. He kissed her fingers, pretending in his mind that he was a younger man who had the right to do such a thing. “I mean, if you asked me any other time I’da had a answer. That answer might not’a been right or true, but I would’a believed it, and so would you have. But, but now it’s all different.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I nevah been the kinda person go out an’ do sumpin’ first,” he said. “I usually look at somebody else and see what they was doin’ and either I’d join in or walk away. My first wife wanted to get married and so that’s what I did. I didn’t really want it, and she knew it, but we had kids and stuck it out for a while. Kids hated me. My ex-wife did too—before she died. But that was okay.

“My second wife come to me before her first marriage was ovah. Come right up to my door. We loved each other, an’ she died by my side, while I was sleep.”

Shirley squeezed his wrist.

“But that’s not what I’m talkin’ ’bout,” Ptolemy continued. “I know all that stuff. That’s who I was , but I ain’t like that no more.”

“What are you like now, Mr. Grey?”

Ptolemy inhaled, feeling the breath come into him. It felt like a hot wind rushing through a valley of stone. His heart pulsed, which for some reason brought to mind the moon in its sky.

“First there was you, Shirley Wring,” he said, or maybe Coy said through him.