The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

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.

“Me?”

“Yeah. I was like a blind man on a clear day. I lived in the dark of my eyes, and then you walked up and spelled your name and I remembered it. That was the first thing I remembered right off for the first time in years. You give me that treasure but what was even better was when I give it back. That was before I fount out that Reggie was dead, before I knew that Hilly stoled from me. That was before Robyn, and before I met the Devil behind his garden of roses and a green door.

“But it all started out with you. Reggie tried, but now that I look back on it I can see that he was a good boy but he couldn’t see the man in me. I was a chore that he did every couple’a days. That’s what old people turn into, chores for the young.”

Shirley hummed her agreement and kissed Ptolemy’s hand.

“And most of ’em don’t even take on that responsibility,” she said.

“If I coulda thought about it I woulda killed myself,” Ptolemy said. “But instead I met Satan and he injected me with his fire. Here I been runnin’ from fire ever since my childhood friend died in the blaze, and when I stopped runnin’ they put a fire in my blood.”

“And what you gonna do now?” Shirley asked.

“Robyn gonna be my heir,” he replied. “I’m gonna ask her to take care’a my estranged children, my family and friends, and, and, and you.”

“Me?”

“Yes, you. You and my great-great-grandnephew and niece and their aunt Niecie.”

“All them?”

“That’s what Coy McCann told me to do and I’ma do it.”

Upon the last word uttered the door to the apartment came open. Robyn, loaded down with four shopping bags, stared at the old folks holding each other on the couch.