from “Blue Obstacles”

The following is an excerpt from an unpublished novel manuscript by Kathleen Collins (1942–1988). You can read Alix Beeston’s introduction to the work on the Daily here.

This room: contains all the dampness in the world. The sheets are dirty. The floor is cold. Rain runs down the gutters. A step away the door opens and a light clicks. Someone climbs the stairs. The light goes out, leaving them in darkness. I’m in a romantic French hovel.

A taxi brought me here in the middle of the night. You carried in my luggage, smoking your pipe and grunting while I kissed you and inhaled the damp odor about you of tobacco and mildew. It was a thrilling moment. I have just arrived in my light blue knit fringed in green, looking like a brown nun. A rough net of black hair controls my face and my eyes focus poorly on things … now on your pointed shoes … now on the unmade bed … now on the dampness, the clutter of your romantic French hovel.

Everything is coming to me fresh through your tinted glasses, your severely pointed shoes. You talk about Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg, the New York School of poets. I’ve never heard of Andy Warhol, nor Frank O’Hara. It is coming to me fresh, while I settle inside the full pout of your lips and inhale the dampness. You have … an odor about you … an odor about you … all these years I have followed in the wake of an odor about you …

I try to arrange my hair while I listen obediently, try to make it behave. It is not practical to run my hands through it, just to pat the way one does with a sensitive spot. You’re describing the collage structure of Rauschenberg’s paintings and your lips actually purse with excitement. All the heat in your face is there between your lips; the rest withdraws behind your tinted glasses. I touch my hair again and hold back the need to rub my nose against your damp vest that smells sour and warm.

In a while, I will go for one of my little promenades. Once a day I come out from under the clutter to walk around in circles and put the sun back in my bones. But right now we’re eating croissants; off a scrap of paper you read a poem called “Lydia with the Coastal Face.” We’re in bed, dipping the croissants in bowls of café au lait. The small, dirty window brings in no light and I haven’t taken a shower since I arrived.

When I go out you begin again your jagged scribblings on bouts de papier, bouts de papier. “Time floats like a bridge between your eyebrows and after joins its sisters, the rain. There are many Mexicos.” I ask for a Pernod and sit in the sun. Methodically I tick off the monuments, the musées, the jardins, the quartiers, the cafés you have suggested I must see. But really, I’m walking about in circles waiting to feel I’m in Paris. Just like that, the magic should click and overwhelm me. In the next café I’ll ask for a jus d’orange pressé or a blanc cassis, followed by one omelette aux herbes fines with pommes frites. When I eat, I feel Parisian. When I order a Pernod and sit in the sun I discern everything in a Parisian way. Until the thought comes home that my hair is messy and I am too dowdily colored to look French. I am not even well colored: just a layer of brown over a layer of yellow. No care at all taken with the shading … pour que je sois a dark, liquid molasses … a warm milk chocolate … a pleasing crème caramel … rather than just colored, stiffly and dowdily like a brown nun.

I come back to an odor of couscous and peppers and the piquant warmth of Gauloises Brunes and burnt coffee. When I hug you a stale, sweaty odor saturates my nostrils and I nearly gush with pleasure. I take off my shoes and stretch out on the damp sheets while you cook. “I found the little restaurant you told me about.” (I want so to charm you.) “When I left Notre Dame I found this old bridge … it felt so much like Paris with the Seine flowing and all those beautiful apartments in the distance with big French windows … I really felt like I was in Paris!” (I want to force you to overlook this muddy veil, this hair that will not behave.) “And sure enough it was the Saint-Louis and the restaurant was right there to the left of the bridge. And guess what I ordered! Un artichaut vinaigrette, coquilles de Jacques, and a demi-carafe of white wine. Isn’t that a lovely lunch.”

I gush, I crinkle my face, I force a Parisian glow into my eyes. And I am rewarded with a smile that settles neatly behind your tinted glasses.

***

If there were only some frosting, some summer by the sea, some secret passion for the rain, some fragrance recalling a smile … to conjure up beside the tight neutrality of my childhood … I would not be here, in this damp clutter, following in the wake of an odor about you. I would not be here, listening to the rain and thinking I can be anyone. If only there were some residual scent of baked bread, or lilacs to offset the odor of embalming fluid in my veins, like a neutral current that cannot ignite itself into life. Then, on my own, I could ooh and ahh over a sunset; I could follow the crimson light on its descent across a building … If there had been some frosting …

I shut my eyes. When sleep comes it will be brought on by a thin stream of urine … the first stream will smell of flowers, of fresh baked bread, of hot ginger cakes, wine and chocolate. The first stream … and I am wandering the street in search of custard donuts, lace half slips, stolen quarters, malted milks. There are no trees. No flowers. No running brooks. No fresh baked bread. No hot ginger cakes. No wine and chocolate. I wet and wet and wet and wet and wet and wet and wet. The cold tears cling about my legs, my thighs, my stomach. The first stream only is warm, reassuring, blessed.

Half-awake, I feel you. Though in my eyes I know it is a ridiculous passion that cannot outlast our differences, still I am in need of the odor about you … your gentle musty odor let loose against the cleanliness that seals me to a hands-and-knees shine.

My parents have gone out. The dark threatening smell of eyes remonstrating against our untidiness: “The housework has been slovenly girls, little careless habits have been accumulating. When you clean the toilet you must put your hands inside the bowl and scrub it. There’s no other way to clean it well. And the floors—you have to wait until the wax is dry and well set before you use the polisher. The baseboards need cleaning. And there should be no vacuuming until all the dusting is done. To give this house a solid cleaning, you girls must get down on your hands and knees. It’s the only way to reach the grimy crevices that the eye misses.” I take a book of matches into the bathroom and close the door. I pile layers and layers of toilet paper in the bowl until they are fluffed high. Then I ignite them, watch them billow and the flame take hold until they collapse into sodden black ashes milling around the bowl. I do it again and again. Until one day the toilet seat catches fire and in the morning I cannot hide the charred remains from my father.

I rub my stomach against your hairy belly. I will reach a point where I will fall down and worship the tight well-constricted mass hanging between your legs. It will make me tremble, go weak with happiness, cause me to set my sights no further than your thighs. In the mildew and dampness that chokes us I can imagine becoming anyone, in tune with the astonishing detachment of your mind. I could catch myself out and fuse, even get rid of the embarrassing smell of embalming fluid and discard my colored self for a more enlightened state of being. That is, after all, why I left the sealed corridors of my father’s house. In search of a metamorphosis that would bring me into daylight.

Anyhow, it’s raining and we don’t have to get up. Why is my father here, in the dampness, disapproving of the soggy, cluttered terrain I have chosen? Why do I see his stern ungenerous countenance presiding over me when I have gone to great lengths, put great distance between us to have a chance at a vague and clumsy life? Can’t a colored woman be vague and full of notions? Can’t she settle on damp, uneven ground and try to twist herself into some odd, unpredictable shape?

***

We have not gone out for three days. Except when we hear the rain, we have no way of knowing what the weather is like. The small barred window lets in the same amount of light, regardless, and we keep a bulb burning over our bed, even when we sleep. You get up at odd hours and sit at your desk. I am not used to sleeping with lights on. I am attached to things like pajamas, a shower, a cup of warm milk with sugar. You are attached to the wall in front of you, staring straight ahead into the night and grunting every now and then. Your fingers hit the keys in answer to the crosscurrents sifting endlessly through your mind. You live an exquisite inner life, full of grace and remembrance, the charm of which has settled on your brows. You live where an endless astonishment holds sway, and yearnings are so whimsical, so free of half-remembered ecstasies that they bend to the simplest fancy. The lilt of your mind is the clearest tone that reaches from you to me. I hear it play more clearly than my own, erupting in some center of lava and decay, waiting to run full steam away from its origins, releasing in its wake a sympathy that will cost me myself.

I bob in and out of sleep trying to stay in tune with your meanderings: now you are here beside me, it is early morning or late night or late morning or early afternoon. You have debated my efforts to keep track of the time. You are reading another poem off another bout de papier … about roses that braid your days, about night breezes and locusts and the blue obstacles routed from the fire … while I search for the right feeling to put on my face, drawn instinctively toward a look of poignant reverence, but worried that perhaps my eyes look slightly crossed under the strain, that my hair is so badly in need of a little dippity-do that I look foolish. You light a cigarette. “That was lovely” drops awkwardly off my tongue. It is so hard for me to believe in beauty. I am equally tongue-tied before a sunset, before the convergent explosion of spring, before a daffodil, a full moon, a rainstorm.

Now you are grinding coffee in a little moulin, tentatively stretched out beside me. I mumble something and drift off. When I come up again there is a strong odor of burnt coffee hissing loudly through the espresso pot and you are asleep at your desk. I shut off the burner and try to persuade you into bed while over your shoulder I read. You’re so gentle and brave and I’m with you, though frost covers the lawns of the darkened necessities and the roses that braid my days be undone … and I start to cry, a sliver of happiness ripping past the mute barrier of my beginnings. I have lost the ground I walk on.

***

It is Palm Sunday and we are dressed for church. My hair is in a perfect pageboy and my father bought me a new orange coat and new patent leather shoes. In the mirror I see the perfect image of myself, my hair is just right, the coat highlights the flat tones of my skin, my eyes are sparkling bright. I know I look just perfect, I won’t look like this tomorrow. My hair will start to go bad again and father won’t let me wear this coat or these shoes except on Sundays, but if everyone should see me now they would love me. My father parks the car at the bottom of the hill just below the church. We have only to walk up the slope under his surveillance. It is he who oversees every detail of our grooming. The little dark blue feathered hat my mother is wearing is his selection; so too our taffeta dresses and bright coats; even our hair has been straightened and curled under his supervision.

My mother bustles along in her feathers, her cream-colored silk … I am in her closet, counting her dresses, her shoes, her nightgowns. She must be coming back, all her clothes are here, her dresses, her shoes, her nightgowns. I count her shoes and arrange them in a neat row. She is so sad when she comes back. I see her standing at the foot of the stairs. I hear my father repeat over and over, “I wasn’t coming to get you. No, sir, I had no intention of coming to get you. None at all.” At the church steps, my father slows me down for one final appraisal. A fold of my mother’s dress has slipped between her buttocks. We are a few minutes late and linger in the vestibule till the opening hymn. My father nods to the Creaseys. Old lady Creasey wears a little pill box hat and a mink stole and gives us a crinkly smile. Her married daughters accompany her and their husbands bring up the rear. They are all near white, their sallow complexions enlivened by brightly rouged cheeks and hair tinted a light auburn.

It is a hot, hot Sunday and I am in white. My grandmother is holding me in her arms, she has begun to rock back and forth. “When I’ve done the best I can and my friends don’t understand, then my Lord will carry me home …” Her body reaches a fatal pitch that lifts her arms outstretched toward heaven and sends me sideways out the pew; her face is like granite, the near-white skin turned to stone. And her eyes remain unplaceable and stern like my father’s but the body is in ecstasy; her tall stately body is tumultuous and real and given over to her homecoming.

I am in perfect communion with her tumult … I know it to be my real heritage, this faceless invasion of an overwhelming sorrow that shatters the heart with grief. The ushers are distributing the palms. “There is a fountain filled with blood drawn from Emmanuel’s veins and sinners washed beneath that flood lose all their guilty stains …” I am seated beside my father when the abiding sorrow begins again, this time attacking his face and causing it to crumble. He is helpless against the nameless flood.

I hold my father’s hand. We are in the light together.

***

I have gone to take a shower in the public bath down the street. For twenty centimes I get soap and a towel from one of those “concierge women.” At the same time I’ve taken along a little shampoo and I’m going to wash my hair and try and mat it into shape. This is my first bath in three weeks. We’re going out to dinner. You’re taking me to meet some friends of yours. I already know what I’m wearing: a bright green knit skirt with a matching sweater, black high heels and gold earrings. Now if I can make my hair inconspicuous I’d look alright.

I cherish the idea of me here in his shower, mingling with the proletariat; all these little sorties into French life excite me. When I buy my baguette at the corner bakery, my tranche de pâté or a little salade macédoine from the charcuterie, I wait in line and rehearse how I will deliver my order … Bonjour, Madame. Il me faut (is that the way to say it or should I say je voudrais bien) deux baguettes, s’il vous plaît. C’est tout, merci, Madame. Bonjour Madame, je voudrais deux tranches de pâté de campagne, deux saucissons secs, une livre de carottes rapées, et une livre de salade macédoine. They take me for a Martiniquaise. Vous êtes de la Martinique, Mademoiselle ? Non, je suis américaine. Vous êtes américaine ? Mais vous n’avez pas d’accent, Mademoiselle. Vous parlez très bien le français. C’est étonnant. Je souris. Je souris. It’s more than a smile. It’s a positive sourire that coats my face at the very idea of being foreign, foreign anything, just foreign.

We meet your friends in a small hotel. One is a very British Canadian, thin and slight of build with a long nose and curly hair, the other is a hearty, graying American who tells intelligent, funny stories. I feel all feet in my high stack pumps and a bit ass-broad in all this bright green. I smile a lot. I have this idea that if I hold my breath and smile a lot no one will notice how pieced together I am. It’s clear that your friends think a great deal of you. Suddenly I am in awe of your grace, your detachment and ease. Here in public I begin to persuade myself into love, take and transform it into love, the love, the only love conceivable for a woman with my neutered imagination. In turn I will give you myself, a blank canvas, and you will etch out the broad strokes of my becoming.

I have managed to impress your friends with my French. I indicated my dinner preferences with a flawless command of the language. Even you give me a smile. Roger, your Canadian friend, is sitting opposite me at dinner, talking about things French. “I find the French indifference so liberating,” he sighs. “They don’t give a damn about you and really, it’s quite the best place for one to sort out things and just want to be left alone. The English are busy bodies. Really, I lived in London for nine years and it’s quite a stultifying place after a while and when I came to Paris I couldn’t believe the French! Even with all their charming little ritual politeness, they’re just about the most indifferent people on the face of the earth and it’s really quite refreshing because it’s on such a sophisticated level.”

“I’m sure I’ll find it quite refreshing after New York, which is really quite a difficult place in which to live …” The inflection in my voice has shifted in his favor, taken on his clipped outer edge. “Really, I lived there for two years and found I was living a dreadfully harried existence …” I’m really quite good at this stretching to make myself fit, a regular chameleon easily muffling my unacceptable self. I shall never recover from my darkness, really. I’ll slip out from behind it whenever I can and change colors under the light. Already I’ve won over your friend Roger, simply by exchanging my opaqueness for his clipped outer edge.

On my way home I’m feeling very cheerful. You stop to buy Elle and Vogue Paris, and we go into a café for coffee. I’ve not done too badly on this first night out and I’m fishing for a light hug. I ask for a jus d’orange pressé in my best French á la Martinique and out of the blue you ask if I ever read fashion magazines.

“No,” I answer, and put aside the question.

“Really? Aren’t you into fashion and makeup?”

“That kind of thing bores me, I’m not the fashion kind.”

“I guess American women are like that.”

“Why should I read fashion magazines?” I didn’t get away with it. I didn’t hold my breath long enough. The sparkle in my eyes didn’t win out.

“To learn how to adorn your body. French women have perfected it to an art, they do wonderful outlandish things with their make-up and their clothes. But simply, just by tying a scarf in some zany way they create a whole new look for themselves. It’s breathtaking.”

I’m frightened. There’s no way my tasteless insularity can feed such a freewheeling imagination that swoops down out of the blue and feasts on the nearest delicacy at hand. This is a ridiculous situation. The best I can do is wait for my dismissal.

“You made quite an impression tonight with your cute little French accent. I didn’t know you could speak that well.”

A bit of nothing and I’m beaming. I’m such an elastic little soul.

***

My eyes closed when those dark lips came toward me. Somebody told Timmy Hays to take me over to the marriage booth. He offered me himself in matrimony and I nodded my head. I was so square. We walked over to the booth and the “minister” gave us a certificate. This is to certify that Timmy Hays and Mildred Pierce … then he kissed me. I went into a trance. But I was dazed. I couldn’t stop watching him. Herbie Williams told him to walk me home but just as we got near my block my father pulled up alongside us and made me get in the car, and Timmy ran away out of old man Pierce’s sight. I felt awful. When we got back in school I looked for Timmy all the time.

It was that kiss that set it off, honey, that’s how ripe she was for a feeling, and old Timmy Hays got there first. When the Hays Brothers came down Johnson Avenue she’d be trottin’ behind them trying to catch up without breakin’ into a run. She was so square and her nose was wide open, chile; she even tried to make friends with Josie Strothers who was going with Timmy’s brother. She’d sneak over to her place and watch Josie curl and coo over Ricardo Hays. Josie’d pump her full of stories and give her tips on how to get Timmy then she’d take turns behind her back. Everybody took turns behind her back. She was so fair and so square and she swallowed everything whole. She tried hangin’ out with Gloria Henry cause Gloria was in a pout over Herbie Williams, and Herbie and Timmy were tight. But you know Gloria, she hated Mildred for being fair and did all kinds of turns behind her back. She told Herbie to tell Timmy … but Timmy knew she was too square for much except following him around, walking past his house a lot, going over to the track meet to watch him practice.

Josie Strothers, Gloria Henry, Maizie Foster, Edna Javis, Jody Silas … they all took turns behind her back. She had swollen lips for old Timmy Hays and all she could do was follow him around with her fair square self while everybody took turns behind her back.

***

We’ve taken to spending Sunday nights at the Coupole with your friends Roger and Bill and a coterie of people who drift in and out. There’s a woman named Marise Silvers who fascinates me. She’s very calm and watchful and I want very much to impress her. She’s extremely fond of you; she told me that after you came to her apartment and read your poems.

The other night you were frivolous and playful. It was a warm night and we surfaced for a little air and took a stroll through the Parc Montsouris. We were talking in French. I was going to envoyer a letter to someone, but no, you corrected me, I poste a letter, I do not l’envoyer. “Oh,” I laughed, blushing at the correction, but in my heart I was frightened. I held my breath and waited to be dismissed, sure that you had found me out, and know now that I was an impersonator. You took my hand and began talking about fourteenth-century tapestries. My stomach collapsed. I mustn’t make mistakes, or you’ll find me out …

It’s almost morning. We’re walking up the Boulevard Raspail on our way home. I’m listening attentively to a story about a girl on a motorcycle who came to Paris to marry you. I see a wholesome-looking girl, short or a bit plump the way you describe her, squiring you around Paris and the countryside on her motorcycle; I see a dazed noncommitted expression on your face as she suggests flying you home and marrying you. I imagine you adjusting your dark glasses and pursing your lips a bit, while a sly squint of a smile escapes and then a chuckle. She meanwhile being altogether captivated by the idea overrides your loose-jointed objections until the tickets are bought and it’s Sunday morning: the day of your scheduled departure. Then you wake up in a huff of anxiety: you have books overdue at the library that must be returned tomorrow. No, no one else can return them, no, they can’t be mailed. No, no, no. She must fly on and you will follow her after you’ve returned the books to the library. I see a deep frown crease your brow as you tell her this, a furrowed look that makes her know you are fondest of the boy you were, eager, above all else, to keep him alive and well, and capable of forsaking anyone for him.

It is a sobering moment. I want to tousle your hair and, in the same breath, disappear, seeing with lightning clarity that sincerity is useless against a man like you. And all I have to offer is sincerity … We’ve reached that wonderful mossy wall of steps that take us up to the Rue des Artistes just as the sun begins its ascent. I, who know nothing about sunsets or sunrises, whose connection to nature is feeble and unlearned, stop and gape at the light touching those old crumbling walls. My hands reach out to follow the veiled light and I begin to cry. Some yearning quivers in me to go inside the light and find a watering place for all my fears; some yearning swollen and real to touch the spot where confusion is laid to rest and there is only what is what is what is without the mean design of our untruths. I want to turn to you and smile and kiss you softly on each cheek and say goodbye … But we’re almost home, stalking the wall that leads to our doorway while the sun floats above the cobbled roofs.

***

I’m caught in a circle, inside a kiss that won’t go away. Every day I detour by this house looking for the beginning of the circle. Every day I relive his kiss: dry and swollen and hard. I close my eyes … a dry kiss comes out of nowhere and touches my flat surprised surface. Then a little collapse goes through me like a knife. I close my eyes … I can revive it at will and the same feeling will pierce the wall. I can revive it anywhere. In the den watching Charlie Chan. At dinner while my father stares. In bed where I am afraid to shut my eyes. It never fails to come behind the wall and stun me. And it has put my heart on the mooning circuit. Margie Hays grins when she sees me walking by. She likes to boast that I’m chasing her brother. I wish I could go in and see him. Maybe he’s at the window watching. I lower my head, I smile. I come through the door composing my lies: “I’m sorry I’m late. I was in the library until around five, then I went by Elizabeth Estok’s to do my math with her, and we just finished. You want me to set the table?” “I’m sorry I’m late. Judy Guttman asked me to help her lay out the paper so we stayed at school until five thirty. They’re going to put my article on the front page.” “Nancy Nijeski fell on her way home from school and I walked her to her house because she was bleeding a lot.” The ice has fallen and lies trickle off my tongue.

I take cover behind a watchful veil, astonished at the width of my deceit, how it curves two-facedly in any direction struggling to avoid collision. My mother’s gentle voice makes little waves at the table, a soft pitter-patter that numbs us; it is so frail and useless against my father’s black and abiding anger. He slices across her twirping. Ramona and I look at each other. We can feel Mommy begin to splash about. Her eyes thicken. In a moment she will come unhinged and a dreadful knot will tie my stomach. I will try to stop her flailing about. Ramona will beg Daddy to leave her alone. Her rage is almost virginal, it is so clean and defensive, intent only on recouping its pride. It has no weight against the troubled waters into which my father sinks, his rage rising from a frightening place full of self-condemnation and neglect. There are no signposts between them. Mommy sends a black frying pan close to his head. He grabs her dress, intent on knocking her down. But here is my body in-between and there is Ramona at his sleeve. We scream for him to stop. He can never seem to stop. We are trapped inside his anger and it is sickly and mean in there and the taste weighs us down. It lingers so. It will be there in the morning when we awake. I will smell it first thing, a sickly after-taste coating our stomachs, and turning the house into a sealed corridor. It lingers, it lingers, it lingers so … When the dishes are done I’ll go quickly to my room and revive my kiss …

 

Kathleen Collins (1942–1988) was an African American playwright, filmmaker, civil rights activist, film editor, and educator. Her film Losing Ground (1982) is one of the first features made by a Black woman in America. A never-before-released collection of Collins’s short fiction, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?, was published in 2016.

Collins’s story “Scapegoat Child” appeared in the Spring 2018 issue of the Paris Review. You can also read selected notes from Collins’s diary on the Daily here.

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