Miss Delvane lived above us from mid-1963 through 1966, and though people in those days had a considerable interest in sex, the country hadn’t yet become one gigantic porn theater. Parents could protect you and allow you to have a childhood, and even if you might have vague suspicions of forbidden secrets, you couldn’t switch on a computer and go to a thousand websites to learn that … Well, that Bambi hadn’t been wished into existence by his mother, and neither had you.
So there was my mom, changing out of her uniform, listening to the rodeo act overhead, and it seemed to her that the groans and the trumpetings of the recorded bull were familiar. During the more than seven years when Tilton hadn’t lived with us, Mom had seen him from time to time, and she had stayed married to him, and when he wanted to come back, she’d taken him. Now she didn’t want to believe that it had been a mistake to let him through the door again. She told herself that all men sounded the same when playing the bull, when their cries of pleasure were filtered through an apartment ceiling. She told herself that it might even be Miss Delvane, whose voice had considerable range and could lower all the way to husky. By then, however, life had dealt Sylvia Bledsoe Kirk numerous jokers in a game where they weren’t wild cards, where they counted for nothing, and she knew this joker because he had ruined her hand before.
She threw his clothes and toiletries into his two suitcases and carried them out of the apartment. The building had front and back staircases, the second narrower and grubbier than the first. My mom knew that, by his nature, Tilton would be prone to slipping out the back, even though he had no reason to think he’d be seen descending from the fifth instead of the fourth floor or that the significance of that extra story would be obvious to anyone.
That day, Mom had decided that Tilton wasn’t just a skirt-chaser and a pathological liar and a narcissist and a self-deluded fool as regarded his career. He was all those things because he was a coward who couldn’t look at life head-on and face it and make a right way through it, regardless of the obstacles. He had to lie to himself about life, pretend it was less hard than it really was, and then press forward by one slippery means or another, all the while deluding himself into believing that he was conquering the world. My mother would never have called herself a hero, although of course she was, but she knew she wasn’t a coward, never had been and never would be, and she couldn’t stand to live with one.
She set the suitcases on the cracked and edge-curled linoleum on the back-stairs landing between the fifth and fourth floors, and she sat a couple of steps lower, with her back to them. She had to wait for a while, and with every minute that passed, she had less sympathy for the devil. Eventually she heard a door close somewhere above and a man slow-whistling “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’,” which had been a hit for the Righteous Brothers back in February.
Tilton was crazy about the tune and whistled it that afternoon without any sense of irony, although later he might have realized it wasn’t the perfect track for that particular scene in the music score for the movie of his life.
He opened the stairwell door and started down and stopped whistling when he recognized his suitcases. The man was an excuse machine, and I imagine at least three marginally believable and a dozen preposterous excuses flew through his mind before he continued to the landing. Of course, when he discovered my mom sitting a few steps down on the next flight, he stopped again and stood there, not sure what to do. He had always been quick with words and especially with justifications, but not that day. He was apparently unnerved by the way she sat in silence, her back turned to him. If she’d made accusations or started crying, he might have dared a lie, pretended he was innocent, but she merely sat there ready to bear witness to his departure. Maybe he thought she had a knife and would stab him in the back when he squeezed past her, encumbered by the suitcases. For whatever reason, Tilton picked up the two bags and, instead of continuing down with them, he returned to the fifth floor.