NEENA WORKED WITH her hair as she prepared to meet Cliff. She greased her scalp and platted her hair into half a dozen braids. She tore a brown paper bag into strips and twisted the strips to use as curlers and rolled each braid. She showered and then moved the blow-dryer around her head. She tried to ignore the circle of hunger in her stomach. She’d not eaten yet because she’d slept much of the day. Felt like a newborn all the sleeping she’d been doing since she’d been here. Sleeping and peeing, it seemed.
She dressed in the peach-colored sweater she’d bought at the Salvation Army Thrift Store, the good black wool skirt that had made the trip from Chicago; her black tights and boots. She made her face up with the ridiculously priced makeup she’d come here with. She remembered buying much of it the week before from a young girl training to be a cosmetics associate at Saks. “I’m hating on you sister-girl ’cause you know how to treat yourself,” she’d said to Neena as she wrapped the already boxed items in tissue paper. When Neena replied that the cost of the bronzing powder alone could feed a Sudanese village for a week, she’d gotten a blank stare from the young girl; then the seven-foot-tall blond supervisor who’d been hovering around pretending to fix the display cleared her throat in a tone that demanded that the trainee respond. “Now see, this company supports the world’s poor,” the young girl rushed to say. “That’s why I’m proud to work here.” She nodded emphatically, even as she gave Neena that why-you-gonna-put-a-sister-on-blast look.
Neena looked in the mirror at the painted-up version of herself. Now she tore off toilet paper and wiped the lipstick from her mouth, now she washed her face of the sheer foundation, the bronzer, the blush, now she creamed her lids to get rid of the taupe-colored eye shadow. Her face was naked now, gleaming. She put Vaseline to her lips. Decided that’s all she’d wear tonight in the way of face adornments. She unwound the twisted paper from her hair and undid the plaits, then picked her hair out into an oversized curly ’fro. She grabbed her coat, her leather purse, and was out of the door.
She stopped at the pay phone in the lobby and called the hospital’s patient information to get an update on Tish. Fair. Okay, Neena told herself, she could handle fair.
The temperature had actually risen since she was last out and she slowed her steps to enjoy the feel of the night. The air was like a feather. She said into the air, “Be okay, Tish. Please. You and my nephew please be okay. Please, please, please.” She repeated it louder as she pushed her voice into the silvery air. “Please be okay, Tish. Please, you and that baby be okay.” Worked herself up to a full-scale incantation as she walked. Walking now past the fountain at Logan Circle; the fountain was shooting pink water into the air and she wondered who would do such a thing as turn the water pink. She thought about all those the pink walls of her childhood; remembered how Tish had grimaced at the one house on Sansom Street when they’d returned from school and Freeda greeted them, gushing, smelling of turpentine and paint thinner. Freeda had just covered the living room walls with the thickest color pink Neena had ever seen, so thick that the room felt smaller, the ceilings lower, and she remembered that she started to perspire. Then Tish began to cry. “This is ugly, I hate it. Who would do such a thing?”
“But, Tisha,” Freeda had said, “I need it. I need the pink to be happy.” Then Freeda’s eyes went darker and Neena wanted to slap the shit out of Tish. Though now as she watched the pink sprays from the fountain interrupting the blue-gray night, she realized that the walls were hideous, really they were.
“Be okay, Tish, please,” she continued to chant as she walked past the Four Seasons Hotel where a town car pulled up into the driveway lined with pots overflowing with nonnative plantings and emptied itself of short white women in minks. Neena called out even louder for her sister and the baby to pull through. She didn’t even care that she looked certifiable out here talking to herself as she continued to pray through the air. She invoked Tish’s name for the several more blocks as she entered the thicker part of downtown. Even as she crossed Market Street. Market Street right now still loaded down with people, all types of people that seemed as if they’d been flung from galaxies far and wide, a miracle that they didn’t start a war of the worlds out here, or at least collide like meteors smashing into each other’s heavens. She was almost shouting out Tish’s name by the time she reached Broad and Chestnut and there in hearing range was Bow Peep at the same corner where’d she’d seen him last. Now she was suddenly embarrassed as Bow Peep looked at her, his long mouth upturned in a smile. She felt like a high-brow Baptist caught dancing at a Pentecostal church as she put clamps to her mouth and shyly waved.
Bow Peep motioned her over. She started to ignore him and continue on but she was already within the range of his gravitational force. So she stopped.
“Whoa, the hair, I like,” he said
She’d forgotten that she’d picked it out into a tall ’fro. “Thanks,” she said. “I’m in a hurry, sort of, and don’t really have time—”
“Yeah, where you headed?”
“Uh, somewhere,” she said, deciding she’d not mention that she was on the way to meet up with his buddy. “We’ll run into each other again soon, I’m sure—”
“You know somewhere there’s a place for us, Neena, a time and place for us. Who is Tish?” he asked before she could pull away. “Isn’t that the name you were just calling out?”
“That’s my sister.”
“Ah, the one who might be having a miscarriage,” he said as he punctuated himself with a low note blown through his flute. “You told me, remember, the night you cried.”
Neena nodded, of course she had. Not like he had special powers and could otherwise know. He began playing his flute again and then she did pull away, even as she felt the notes he blew pushing like a massage in the small of her back.
She stepped into the blue-colored air of the venue for the fund-raiser. An upscale jazz club. She was bombarded by the sight of pink-leather-purse-draped women all pseudo-pretty in a Condoleezza Rice been to charm school but I’ll cut you if you fuck with my man sort of way, the men in pin-striped designer suits. She thought that if Tish were well she would fit into such a place except that her sister was really pretty, really nice. A flat-faced woman with slicked-back hair and rimless glasses sitting behind a skirted table asked Neena for her name, then told her to stand off to the side because she wasn’t on the list and someone would speak with her shortly. Neena ignored her and walked toward the main room, replied to the woman’s “Miss, uh, please,” that she was just going to use the ladies’ room for goodness sakes, an oversight anyhow that her name wasn’t on the list. Said bitch under her breath as she went into the bathroom and then commenced to sneeze from an overwrought bouquet of tiger lilies taking up the granite-topped vanity, granite the new Formica, she thought as she used the bathroom then stood at the vanity and took her time washing her hands though the lilies were making her eyes swell, her nose run. She lifted a cotton napkin from a stack folded in a gold-leafed basket and drenched it with hot water and held it to her face. Her inescapable reality mingled with the steam rising off the napkin and sifted into her pores: that she was destitute in her black on black designer clothes. She wondered how many times in the course of a day she’d encountered people who looked like her, normal-looking, well-dressed people. She’d never considered that they might be hungry, like she was right now, that they might be the end-of-the-week-away from homelessness. She got a chill at the thought. She heard someone coming into the bathroom so she dabbed her face dry and reapplied Vaseline to her lips. Her hair was standing wild and she pulled her fingers through to make it taller still, then patted the ends to shape it into a more even mound. She walked out of the bathroom and once again back into the blue air of the jazz club.
She edged past the woman checking names and moved toward the sounds of a vibraphonist warming up in the bar on the other side of the club’s main room. Baby-stepped her way across the hardwood floor around the circles of people sipping wine and munching on political commentary. A tray of petite food floated past and she started to reach and pull away one or several, wanted to just tell the waiter to give her the entire tray so she could find a corner somewhere and stuff them two at a time into her mouth as empty as her stomach was, load her purse up with the rest to eat when she returned to her room. The tray was filled with crab meat; she could tell by the smell and she was allergic to shell fish. Another tray went by her head filled with shrimp. She wondered what was wrong with having a little cheese and crackers, some chicken wings. Hated the way some black people felt the need to overdo as she dodged the cell phones that waved through the blue air like silver minnows until she made it over to the marble bar area that was cast in a soft pink light. The sounds of the vibraphonist melted the pretense over here, the air over here creamy and quiet compared to the rest of the club. Excitement surging in the rest of the club because rumor was that Barack Obama was slated to drop in. A sparse assemblage of deal makers and men and women trying to get some physical release sat or stood in couplets around the bar and hung on to each other’s whispers. Neena settled into a leather-clad booth. She slid her coat off and ordered a ginger ale. She sipped the ginger ale slowly. Allowed the lilting sounds from the vibraphone to work through her like so many fingers, so calming this music was. She had a clear view to the circle of light where the vibraphonist played. An old head. Complexion like a copper penny. He was playing “The Shadow of Your Smile,” and Neena wondered if Cliff would even show up. Couldn’t believe that she was preparing to do this yet again. She hopscotched through her memory and thought of the other men she’d conned, landing now on that first one.
He was a doctor, she’d met him while selling pharmaceuticals; she was in her twenties and shaking down a man had been the farthest thing from her mind. She’d actually felt something for that one. Not love exactly but a sweetening in the air when she was with him as if wind chimes were suddenly moved to sound. He was coal black with silky straight hair; told Neena over the lavish dinner paid for by the drug company so that he would write their prescriptions that his wife married him mainly because she wanted her children to have pretty hair. His wife was obsessed with hair, he’d said, and looked as if he was about to cry.
He was a gentleman. He didn’t press his knees against her thighs at all during dinner the way that one doc had, nor did he slip his delicate surgeon hands beneath the stark white tablecloth to cop a schoolboy’s feel as they shared a caramel-apple ice-cream dessert. And even though he did kiss her mouth good night at the dinner’s end, it was a tenuous kiss that asked permission. Neena appreciated that he was polite that way. The night lasted then for a few hours more in a hastily gotten room at a Westin Hotel. A year-long affair ensued until it was time for her to move on.
For the occasion of breaking up she’d served him in the dining room of her one-bedroom apartment that she’d rented furnished. She loved the view that apartment had of Lake Erie that caught the fractured rainbows in the evening light. She’d prepared appetizers of smoked blue fish and crumbled feta rolled in phyllo, a spinach and orange salad, a main course of linguini under blackened tuna. She’d started off by talking about Freeda; she’d otherwise never talked about Freeda and even that night did so in metaphors. “My mother spun in and out of my sister’s and my growing-up years the way that fabric did when we used to go with my grandmother when she’d buy material for the choir robes she was always stitching. The fabrics were wound on these huge bolts, rows and rows of bolts from the ceiling to the floor in store after store along Fourth Street in South Philadelphia.”
He looked at her quizzically as she talked, wondering, she could tell, where the story was headed. His soft face scrunched mildly as he glanced at his watch. He was supposed to be at the board meeting for Black Men Making a Difference. The meeting would go until ten so he needed to leave by nine thirty so that he could fall in on the end of the meeting and be seen there. He rubbed his hand up and down her arm. “That doesn’t give us a lot of time for, you know.” He motioned toward the bedroom, then leaned in to kiss her arm.
She pulled her arm away. “This is important,” she said.
He relented and dropped his delicate hands, reminding her that he had only until 9:30. She wasn’t insulted; didn’t feel exploited. She generally wanted to move against him as much as he did her. She was using him too. But at that moment she needed to say what she needed to say as she described the most spectacular bolt of all. The one wound up with hot pink silk. She stretched her arms and swept them wide. “My mother was like that pink-colored silk; she’d spread out in a grand display, just dazzling she was. But sooner or later her sadness would hit and she’d roll up into a tight button until—poof—she was gone. The thing is, though, once you’ve had that silk wrapped around you and been carried on a wild and riveting ride, you know, the love, the excitement, it’s like you never get over it, you know, you just got to have it next to your skin, you know, so you do whatever it takes to track it by the threads left behind.” She sat against the ladder-back chair exhausted after trying to describe Freeda, her attachment to Freeda, met his puzzled expression and then she sighed.
“The point I’m trying to make,” she said, “is that when I was nineteen I withdrew from my sophomore year at Temple University and used my savings to come to Cleveland because this is where I’d heard my mother was.” She paused to swallow and catch her breath.
“And?” he said, more than asked as he lightly drummed his slender fingers against the table. “Is she here?”
“She was here, she’s gone now, but she was. Anyhow, I’ve been working with a private detective who located a woman who’d befriended her, and it looks like she’s in Newark.”
“Your mother or the friend?”
“My mother, who do you think. Would I be packing up to leave here for some anonymous friend?!”
“You’re leaving?”
“That’s what I’m trying to say, yeah. I’m leaving. I’m Newark-bound, you know, as soon as I can.”
He didn’t say anything, his disappointment visible in the way that he lowered his head and concentrated on twirling the linguini around his fork. She hoped he wouldn’t cry. She had the thought that he wouldn’t be able to go on without her given his apparent hunger for her that would spill all out of his skin as soon as she opened the door and she’d rush him inside so that his hunger wouldn’t grow an ocean on the hallway carpet. She tried to keep the conversation upbeat as she told him that though the hunt for her mother was draining financially, work should be easy to come by in Newark. She ended her spiel with how glad she was that they’d never been found out. She knew how important that was to him, his marriage, his coveted position as the chairman of the Deacon Board at his church.
He raised his head when she got to the part about his marriage, his generally soft-featured face suddenly a hardened mold of itself. His fork hung in midair, his arm paralyzed, linguini strands tic-tocking from the fork splattering the sauce against his blazingly white polo. She knew enough to know that this was not the look of someone about to sing a Chi-Lites tune of “Oh Girl” (I’ll Be in Trouble if You Left Me Now).” Knew that this was the look of someone thinking he’s being shaken down. She was smart that way in her ability to discern facial expressions. Too smart for her own good, her grandmother always said.
He started to cough; his delicate surgeon hands covering his mouth with a salmon-colored linen napkin; his eyes darting frantically as if she’d just said, Pay up or I’ll send pictures of our naked asses to your wife, your pastor, your straight-haired kids.
She felt a rage building that he could so readily misconstrue their year together as her orchestration of some premeditated sting. She fingered the stem of the glass holding her ice water, thought about tossing it right where his eyes bulged. She combed her fingers through her hair instead, pushed its thickness toward her face to hide her rage. She’d had her hair flat-ironed the day before at an overpriced salon because he liked it bone straight. Realized then that it was him, not his wife, who had a thing for hair. Counted up all the money she’d spent on her hair the year they’d been together. All the money she’d spent period shopping the gourmet aisles to put together meals like the one she’d fixed that evening. Her rage flapped around in her chest like a caught bird as she considered the price she’d paid for clothes that tantalized like the hot pink off-the-shoulder drape-neck top that she wore right then that fell to one side when she moved a certain way. It fell halfway down her arm because she was rocking herself to settle herself down the way she’d always done. The rocking worked so well for her that day that by the time he stopped coughing and could straighten himself up in the ladder-back chair and get his mouth to work to ask her how much? How much did she want to go away quietly? She didn’t throw her ice water in his face, didn’t shout, Asshole, I’m not trying to extort money, I’m only trying to tell you about my mother! She fixed the dark severity of her eyes on him. Calmly replied then, “Five thousand. You know, I think five thousand should do.”
She had been surprised how quickly, how easily that first one paid. And that had been in the early nineties before the proliferation of the Internet. The Internet changed everything. Even a married man who might admit to an affair would do whatever it took to prevent himself from actually being seen so compromised in the form of streaming video e-mailed to his prestigious Listservs. Cade had been the first man to actually take a chance that she’d been bluffing. She wished she hadn’t been bluffing. Wished she had the video for real. Wished there was a way she could get into that Chicago condo. She wouldn’t allow herself to think about all of her possessions locked up there. Had to imagine it all dead.
Neena drained her ginger ale, ate the cherry that adorned it, even chewed the cherry stem trying to pacify her stomach that was beginning to make its emptiness heard. She looked up then because she felt someone staring at her; there he was finally, Cliff. She tried not to look at his eyes, had noted even in that two-second glance the night they first met that he had sad eyes. She looked at his chest, he was wearing a pink tie; now she looked at his mouth; a dark, pretty mouth; a strong nose; back to his eyes. Now she didn’t even guard against her hyper-empathetic predisposition and the sadness in his eyes sneaked up on her, gathered along the surface of her skin, oozed under her skin like a foamy cream, making her hold on to his gaze, smiling as she did.
Cliff stepped into the club with an attitude. As he’d turned the corner headed here he’d had to confront a gang of white boys—neophyte lawyers he could tell by snatches of their conversation—taking up the entire sidewalk as they practiced the art of making people walk around them. To walk around them meant Cliff would step into a puddle of water in the street so he barreled right for their center. The shortest of the gang said, “Hey pal, an excuse me would have been nice.”
“No, you not clogging the sidewalk with your snot noses would have been nice, really nice,” Cliff said as he pushed on through and continued walking.
“Sign that dude up for anger management,” one of them said to Cliff’s back. Cliff snuffed the urge to turn back around and escalate the confrontation. He was angry. He’d just lost a case today. Tempted to blame that loss on the fact that he’d worn pink. His wife, Lynne, had told him that pink was the color for 2004 and if he were really secure he’d wear the pink shirt/tie ensemble she’d given him for their tenth anniversary. He’d worn the ensemble today, though he was old school. Resisted now relating the pink to his lost case. Enough tension between Lynne and him these days, especially with her mother, Babe, there without making Lynne responsible for his losses. He shook off thoughts of his wife, her mother, the lost case, the white gang out on the street because he needed his game face for this fund-raiser, this one to tap the region’s conservative-leaning blacks, the type who sipped sauvignon blanc at art shows and complained about the poor. Generally not Cliff’s crowd since he’d been a poor boy until he’d started practicing law. And even for a time after he’d rejected material excess because back then to struggle was noble. He’d sympathized with the Black Panthers in his youth, demonstrated and raised his clenched fist as he’d shoveled his way through the Ivy League, for what? he’d been asking himself of late, to pave the way for this newest generation of black professionals to buy tank-sized Humvees.
Once he stepped into the club, the blue-colored air was actually a surprising relief, the sudden burst of warmth a relief too, as were the knowing sounds from a vibraphone, the smell of wine and designer perfumes. A long line of people chatted it up in front of him as they waited to sign in. He looked through the diminished light in here beyond the table gauging the turnout. Good turnout. Dove, the receptionist from his law office, sat behind the table checking names. Before Cliff could get to her, to say that a woman, Neena, would be showing up who wasn’t on the list, Dove had already lowered her rimless glasses gesturing with her eyes for Cliff to look at her. “Just one, so far,” she said as she scanned the foyer area. “You can’t miss, very big sixties hair.”
Cliff knew that was most likely Neena. That was how they handled people who’d not anted up in advance. Cliff would introduce himself, make nice, extract a card, send a gracious letter the next day acknowledging their presence at the fund-raiser, extolling the virtues of the candidates they’d endorsed, the expense of running campaigns, not to mention the cost of uncorking all that champagne. A check generally followed from all but the severely obtuse or destitute. He made his way now from the foyer to the main room, shaking hands and slapping backs. He followed the blue air in here over to the soft pink of the bar area. That’s when he saw Neena. He still didn’t remember her from the other night and he wondered what else his preoccupation with Lynne was making him miss as he looked at Neena’s hair, thick and wild as if she’d just undone braids and not even finger-combed it, just let it stand and fall where it may. Bold of her, he thought, to wear her hair like this with this crowd that Dove called the St. John suit club. He liked that boldness. He thought that she had an odd-looking face, simultaneously soft and severe. Taken with the Crayola-black eyes, though, the tender, amorphous mouth; the mild brown complexion; the thick hair falling every which way; Cliff decided that she was in fact beautiful. Though he wouldn’t bother making a pitch for a donation because she was also broke. How did he know that? he asked himself the way he often did when he’d drawn a conclusion based on a quick observation, the rationale for which hadn’t yet leaked into his conscious mind.
A granite-topped serving table separated them. Cliff became aware of the table when he rammed his bad knee into its base as he tried to make it over to where she sat. He refrained from grabbing the knee and hollering out, though he was momentarily stunned from the jolt that radiated out from his knee all the way to his toes, his scalp. It took everything in him not to grimace, not to limp as he walked toward her, extending his hand, taking her hand in his, saying, “Hello, Neena? Right?”
“Yes, I’m Neena, guilty as charged,” she said as she tried not to look for too long in his eyes.
“As a lawyer, Neena, I’d advise you never to admit guilt, at least not right away. May I sit?”
“Please, feel free,” she said.
“Feel free, huh?” he said as he eased into the booth. “I have to admit that’s something I’ve not felt for a while now, free.” He didn’t know why he said that, hadn’t even known that was the exact truth about how he felt until he’d said it. He laughed for levity’s sake.
Neena continued to smile her gushy smile. “From what I can see of these people,” she said, “you appear to be the most free person in here tonight.”
“I have to admit it, these aren’t generally my people here tonight.”
“No? So what’s it like with your people?”
“Ooh,” he laughed softly, “that depends on whether beautiful women like you are gracing the crowd.” He stopped himself. What was he, anyhow, an old man trying to get a rap going? Poor rap at that. He looked straight at Neena, about to apologize for bordering on the inappropriate. Her lips were smirked to one side playfully. He wondered if Lynne made such an expression when she sat across the table from whomever. His stomach tightened at the thought and he smiled so that he wouldn’t grimace.
“So now, tell me about your unusual case,” he said as the barmaid stood over him and he pointed to Neena’s glass, and Neena said, Please, yes, another ginger ale, and Cliff said he’d have the same.
“Actually, I’m going to be perfectly honest with you, Cliff, since you can likely spot a liar at fifty paces. I don’t really have a case for you.”
Cliff raised his eyebrows. Now he saw what it was that told him that Neena was broke. The sweater. It had once belonged to his wife, he was sure, only because he’d given the sweater to Lynne, then shortly after he’d seen it in the top of the give-away bag headed for the Salvation Army. Lynne had apologized over and over when he asked her about it. “See, look what happened to it,” she’d said as she stretched it out to show him. “I wore it to that Maya Angelou reading and the stupid huzzy on the door insisted that she couldn’t let anyone in unless their name tag was prominent. So me, like a dummy, stuck the adhesive thing on the sweater knowing how delicate this kind of cashmere is. And then this happened when I peeled it off,” she’d said as she showed him the rectangular-shaped scar of pulled wool. He focused on the rectangular patch now as he listened to Neena admit that she didn’t really have a case to discuss with him.
“Actually, I’m working tonight,” Neena said.
“Yeah? What do you do? May I ask?”
“Actually my employer sent me to seduce you, get you caught up in a scandal to bring you down. You’re raising too much money for their opponents, you know.”
Cliff hadn’t expected that. He laughed out loud. A truly felt, unfettered laugh.
Neena played with her straw. Her stomach was growling louder now, embarrassingly so as she listened to his laughter mixing with the vibraphonist’s competent strokes, the compressed energy spilling in here from the main room. His laughter so sheer and unclipped.
“They wouldn’t have sent you,” Cliff said when he’d recovered himself. “They would have sent a white one. They always send a white woman when they’re trying to bring a brother down.”
“Would that have worked with you?”
“What, a white one?”
“No, me?”
“Oooh,” he said, his smile still hanging around his face, “that’s a setup if I ever heard one. If I say yeah, I’m saying I’m a gullible charlatan who runs around on his wife. If I say no, I’m saying you’re not irrestible. And I’m not about to say you’re not irresistible.”
Neena lowered her eyes, feigning shyness, though she actually felt shy. The barmaid returned with their drinks and Cliff turned to speak to a woman who’d waved. Neena sipped her ginger ale and focused in on the vibraphonist who was stroking a sultry rendition of “’Round Midnight.” That had been one of her grandfather’s favorite songs according to Freeda. Once Neena, who had only heard the instrumental version, asked her mother what the words were and Freeda recited them and midway through Neena was sorry she’d asked and told her mother to stop. Thought the words too sad for her mother to be repeating since holding the sadness at bay was their greatest challenge. “Midnight is always sad,” Freeda had said. “Too many miles to travel ’til the sun rises. Unless you’re well enough to sleep, and fortunate enough to dream soft dreams.”
Neena didn’t want to give herself over to thinking about that here and now. She’d thought much about it over the years during her own waking midnights, many sad. Though she’d also had her times for dreaming softly. Couldn’t bear the idea that her mother had not.
Cliff ’s attention was back. “So you were telling me about how you’re setting me up for a scandal, Neena.” He laughed.
“No,” she said. “You were telling me how you’re not about to say that I’m not irresistible, though I’ll have to diagram that sentence to figure out the double negatives.”
“No need, two negatives always make a positive, right?”
Before she could say anything else Dove was standing over Cliff, telling him that the mayor had just come in.
“Tell him I’ll be over in five,” Cliff said.
“You’re joking, right?” Dove said, looking from Cliff to Neena, pausing to look Neena up and down, pursed her lips together then, her lips thin, colored in a muted pink shade of gloss.
“I’m not joking, no,” he said, trying to keep the edge from his voice as he gave her that what-the-fuck-is your-problem look. She stashed right back over her rimless glasses.
“It’s okay, really, I’ll be here,” Neena said. “You’ve got business, got to free the people.” She smiled at Cliff as she said it, darkening her eyes, though, as she glanced up at Dove thinking that Dove took her for a know-nothing in an Afro. She knew things. Smart. If she’d wanted, she told herself she could be dangling from the side of that same mountain that many of the people in here were dangling from right now. Trying to make it to the top. She’d recognized long ago that the top was a cruel illusion, especially for people like her. A mountain for Sisyphus to climb is all it was.
Cliff got up then and bowed in Neena’s direction. He resisted the urge to reach out and stroke her face. He pivoted on the wrong foot and turned to walk away and felt another searing jab move up his knee, limping for real now, thinking, Fuck it, his knee was gone; he was fifty. No sense in trying to hide it.
Neena took his limp to be a swagger and she smiled as she watched him walk away. She liked him, she had to admit. Though she couldn’t like him, not yet. Cloud her judgment if she gave over to liking him. Though right now her judgment was already clouded by her hunger. Her hunger really rumbling now without the distraction of conversation with Cliff. She’d have to get something to eat before the night slunk much farther along. Depending on how long Cliff would be, she might have to slip out of here before he even returned. There would have to be fast food nearby. A Wendy’s she remembered on Fifteenth Street, a McDonald’s on Broad on the other side of Market. Didn’t they have a dollar burger special going on now? She was salivating as she thought about a hamburger, a shake. God, what she wouldn’t give for one of Mr. Cook’s milk shakes with the thick chocolate syrup that wouldn’t allow itself to be mixed in so that it came up through the straw all solitary and potent and hung in her mouth and there it would finally blend with the thick cream of the shake. Or the chili he made in the winter that they’d have on Saturday nights after her shift was done and they’d close the store and she’d help him cash out and they’d sit in a booth exhausted and he’d call to his wife, “Okay, Mrs. C., time for you to do a little work for a change and serve me and baby girl.” The jalepeños would bring tears to her eyes but she just let the tears roll because she couldn’t stop eating the tender beans, the chunks of onions, the perfectly seasoned beef. She thought she would cry for real right now as she even pictured her grandmother’s chicken and dumplings, more than pictured, she could actually smell the pepper and the dough coming together in the pot, imagined how the chicken would just fall off the bone. Wondered if her grandmother still cooked like that. She was getting up there, seventy-six her last birthday. God, why did they have to so dislike each other, she wondered as her mind jumped from one of her grandmother’s specialties to the next: the sweet potato pies, the corn bread she made from scratch, the applesauce that she’d prepare in extra large quantities because people all the way at the other end of the block would smell the apples boiling, the cinnamon and nutmeg and butter going in, and suddenly they’d appear at the front door, starting a conversation with Nan, asking casually if that was her applesauce they smelled. Neena thinking now that Nan’s applesauce could give someone religion, thinking that she’d try Jesus all over again if she could have a bowlful right now, hot, with a couple of straight-from-the-oven buttered yeast rolls on the side. Her desire for food at that instant was so intense that she could barely catch her breath.
And then Cliff was back, looking at Neena’s face in the candlelight; her face was flushed and he thought that the look was one of desire, thought that Neena wanted to be with him. He wasn’t sure what he wanted, knew what he didn’t want, though. Didn’t want to go home like a loyal puppy dog, panting after his wife, yelping for her to bring her head down out of the clouds, and once she did, looking at Cliff as if he was the troll that had just replaced the prince. And here was Neena with her palpable desire, her wanting that was so effusive that it seemed to hit him right at his throat, making him swallow first, then clear his throat, then grab at his tie because suddenly the tie was too tight, too heavy, though it was a light-weight silk. Suddenly the knotted pressure of the tie against his neck made him feel that he might gag, made him acutely conscious of the pressures in his life like his dementia-suffering mother-in-law living with them now, and the pressure of being middle-aged, presumably successful with his Italian leather briefcase and hand-stitched shoes, and oversized house in Chestnut Hill, while at his core a circle was spinning around and around fueled by a feeling of purposelessness. And there was Neena’s wanting that right now in the blue-lit air at this jazz club was better than church the way it zeroed in on his need to make an immediate adjustment in his life, loosen the damn tie so that he wouldn’t choke.
Neena’s brows curved in a question mark as she watched Cliff undo his tie completely and just let it hang from his neck. She laughed then, a free fall of a laugh, and her oversized hoop earrings made circles of the blue light in here as she laughed.
Now he was back to thinking about Lynne’s laugh as he eased into the booth. Wondered if this is how Lynne laughed when she sat across from whomever it was she was having an affair with. There it was, finally. He’d let the feeling take form, attached to it congruence, three simple words: she’s running around. Who was it? Who had moved in on his wife, moved against her with a compelling slow grind? Would have to be compelling, he was no slouch himself, he thought. And he’d been faithful. The whole fifteen years, like a hundred-yard punt return, he’d woven around the big-legged, curved-hipped temptations, the temptations so heavy with his own desire that he’d even had the breath knocked out of him once or twice. But he’d stayed on his feet. The goal line in sight, Lynne the goal line, he’d carried, carried rushing always back to her. Felt like such a fool that he had as he listened to Neena laugh. Felt like a mother-fucking, son-of-a-bitching fool. There was that rage again, that Cliff ’s-only rage that stood alone. And here was Neena affecting him.
He didn’t know what is was about her, if it was the secondhand sweater, or the boldness of the nappy hair, or her quick wit, or that she’d put money in Bow Peep’s case that night in the snow, or even that he was being cheated on and Neena was here and available. How available, he wondered, as he looked at Neena directly? No play to his face, his voice, as he got in between her laugh and said, “Okay Neena. So why’d you call?”
“Why’d I call?” She stopped mid-laugh and repeated the question. Pretended to be thinking about her answer as she picked up her glass. Though she’d known already what she would say.
“Yeah,” he said. “Since you’re not a prospective client, what are you looking for from me?”
She cleared her throat, then swallowed. “Actually, Cliff, I called because I’m just back in Philly after some years away. Not a lot of friends here anymore.” She pushed the sweater sleeves up to her elbows, then pulled them back down again. “And I have a possible job offer here, with Merck, pharmaeutical sales, so I’m thinking about settling here again and I just thought I’d put myself out there and follow up with people I’ve been meeting, you know.”
“So what? You just randomly calling people or should I consider myself lucky?”
“You know, I have to tell you, Cliff, no offense, but I’m not usually into lawyers, it’s really your friend, Bow Peep, who made me want to get to know you.”
“Bow Peep? What’d he say?”
“It’s not what he said, it’s just the fact that you know, you’d have him as a friend. It gives you a whole ’nother dimension. I’ve had huge affection for people like Bow Peep who the sane and proper might consider close to the edge, and I could tell a lot about a person by the way they responded to her?”
“Her?”
“Yeah, a cousin, we were close?”
“Is she still alive?”
“No,” she said. She didn’t know why she said it, felt small explosions going off in her stomach reminding her that she was starving. “Anyhow, you know, I’m back here in Philly, and trying to make new friends, and then I was moved by Bow Peep’s flute playing and I could just tell that he has this really generous spirit and then I could tell, you know, that you really care about him. So I thought, here’s this lawyer, probably thinks he’s, you know, a real gift, yet his heartstrings are obviously pulled by someone who plays a flute while wearing sandals in the snow. It’s hard to explain—”
“No, I get it, Neena. Really I do. And I really appreciate you saying that,” he said. “The guy is like a brother. Got messed up in Vietnam so I do what I can. Smart guy too.”
“I’ve noticed. He’s kinda profound.”
“Oh, so you two been talking, huh?”
“I ran into him on my way here.”
“Uh oh, he counsel you?”
Neena laughed. “Well—”
“You know that’s what he does. He believes that anybody who stops to listen to him play has a heightened sensitivity, you know, an evolved awareness. He believes he can help get them to the next level. And honestly, who am I to say he can’t? I know people tell him stuff, personal stuff that he never repeats because it’s like he respects a type of—what would you call it? A musician-listener confidentiality, I guess you’d call it.”
“I saw him give a woman all of his money—”
“He does that too. And I’m like, Come on Bow Peep, word get out on you and you’re gonna have every freeloader in Philly on your corner.”
“I think he knows who to give it to, though.”
“Hope so,” Cliff said, thinking now about how Bow Peep had always been a bone of contention between Lynne and him, Lynne once telling him that with all he did for Bow Peep it was as if he, Cliff, had a son whose existence she wasn’t privy to until after they were married. Now he let his eye search for the rectangular scar on the cashmere sweater Neena was wearing to make sure that he hadn’t imagined it. There it was, evident under the soft pink glow of the candlelight, its presence making him realize what it was about Neena that was affecting him most of all. That she wasn’t Lynne was affecting him most of all.
The vibraphonist was playing “Moody’s Mood for Love” and Neena sang a bar: and then she unleashed that free fall of a laugh, made Cliff laugh too.
“You’re too young to know that song,” he said.
“I’m older than I look.”
“And I’m married.”
“And?”
“And I don’t mean to sound inappropriate,” Cliff said. “I mean, I’m not coming on to you, at least I don’t think that I am, I’m just, mnh, what am I doing here? I’m just, just saying, you know. I wanted you to know that.” He cleared his throat. “That I’m married.”
“So I know that,” Neena said, and then she was quiet; they both were as the sounds of the vibes made circles over their heads.
When the song was over Cliff looked at Neena and raised his eyebrow. He didn’t know what he was asking of her with his raised eyebrow. Neena could tell that he didn’t know. She was mildly surprised by his awkwardness.
“So does your wife know?” she asked.
“Know what?”
“That you’re married?”
“Ooo, you’ve got jokes, huh?” Cliff said as he watched her pretty mouth unfurl into a demure smile. Then he looked away, down at the globe covering the soft pink of the candle. “Listen, Neena,” he said. “Would you like to get out of here? We could go somewhere. Where would you like to go?”
“Mnh,” she said, working hard to sound nonchalant. “I guess we could grab a bite to eat. Are you up for something like that?”
“Always up for something like that,” he said as he extended his hand and helped her up. She reached back for her coat and he held it open as she pushed her arms through the sleeves.
They weaved around the throngs of donors; many were laughing in earnest now, the alcohol beginning to peel away their facades in layers. They made it to the other side of the heavy wooden door where the night air was the color of smoky silver. They walked beyond the circles of people lighting cigarettes and then stood there as if realizing suddenly that they were strangers. Neena thinking that she hadn’t even gotten to a library yet to google his name.
“So, Neena, do you have any place in mind?” he asked.
“No, you choose. I told you I’ve been away for a while.” She avoided his eyes, looked at his mouth instead, his solid rock of a chin. She counted the gray hairs in his mustache.
“Mnh,” he said. “My buddy’s got a restaurant near South Street. Did you drive?”
“No. I’m staying not too far from town. Over on the Parkway with my great-aunt?”
“Well, the place I’m thinking about is five blocks away. You mind the walk?”
Neena said that no, she didn’t mind the walk, even as her head made its objection known, light-headed from hunger, though she walked anyhow.