Kitt and Posie communicated across the dining-room table as they helped the children get settled into chairs, and tied napkins under their chins, and spooned up their plates. Kitt’s loosened facial muscles said that she was so relieved that Verdi hadn’t devastated Johnson by storming out after all; the confident tilt of Posie’s head said see I told you, true love always, always wins. And now everyone crowded into the dining room as mothers and fathers and neighbors piled their plates high with food, and the children made instruments and weapons of their plastic utensils, and parents started to yell, stop that, put that down, and Verdi came into the dining room and lightened it a hundred watts she was glowing so. She did her special clap and wave that the children from her school understood and that always settled them down, and at least Posie and Kitt were able to get pizza squares onto their plates. And now the party switched places as the children claimed the dining room, and the adults, grateful for the supervision if they had children here, and for the opportunity to pair off with a member of the opposite sex if they were here unattached, slipped unobtrusively into the living room.
Johnson still stood in the archway, leaning against the molded post, allowing it to prop him up because the whole substance of him had gone to mush. His palms were burning from where they’d just touched Verdi’s palms, their lifelines facing, the bend in his fingers aching to curl around hers. He wanted to look down at his hands to see if they looked different, to see if they were red and flush or even on fire hot as they were. But he wanted more to look at Verdi as she walked around the dining-room table helping one child with her napkin, another break his pizza square in half. As long as he could see her he’d know for sure she wasn’t some cruelly satisfying mirage. She kissed a red-faced boy on his cheek and right now he wanted to be that child, wanted to know again her lips against his face. He felt himself sinking as he watched her walk into the kitchen behind Posie because he didn’t want to lose sight of her because if he lost sight of her he might have to wait twenty more years before their palms could touch again. He felt as if he wanted to cry even as he told himself that he was being ridiculous, acting like a little boy or worse a lunatic.
He straightened himself up and took up his weight again. He couldn’t allow himself to just splatter like this in Kitt’s house. He cleared his throat, began to search for someone he could laugh with from among the adults in the living room. Thought that he should get a plate of food first, put his hands to some good use, try to act casually, try not to let it show that he was on a launching pad headed for some heretofore uncharted emotional territories, spinning, weightless, and so filled up.
He was self-conscious as he crossed over into the dining room, the clickety-clack of the children’s indistinguishable chatter mimicking his own inexpressible internal clatter as he walked to the buffet where Kitt was oozing melting lime sherbet from its carton into a punch bowl filled with 7UP and ice. She nudged him, poked her elbow into his side as she stirred the punch. “How you doing?” she asked.
How was he doing? he thought to himself. How did she think he was doing? There were no words to describe how he was doing. She might as well have asked Sage to explain to her how he was doing. He hunched his shoulders as he picked up a plate from the buffet, a napkin wrapped around a fork and a knife. “I’m—I’m, you know, I don’t know,” is all he said.
Kitt had her face tilted in a question mark, her mouth fixed to say something else, maybe apologize to him for manipulating circumstances so that he’d find himself shocked like this, shaken. She could see how shaken he was. But right then Sage began banging her fists on the table, then she pushed herself back from the table and jumped down, bounded across the room headed for the front door.
“Somebody must be coming,” Kitt said as she handed the empty sherbet carton to Posie who’d just peeped her head in to see how the serving platters were holding up. “Can’t imagine who it is, since everybody who’s supposed to be here is already here.”
Then Sage started spinning around and stomping her feet and pointing her fist toward the door.
“Obviously a stranger or she wouldn’t be so agitated,” Kitt said, concern splashing her forehead as she followed Sage into the other room and that started the parade of Sage’s party mates as they all headed toward the front door. The children hampered Johnson from falling in line right behind Kitt though he tried to, had always had a peeve about a woman answering the door after dark if a man was in the house, probably from having felt the need to protect his mother after his father left.
Verdi walked in from the kitchen then with a pitcher filled with springwater floating lemon circles along the top. She edged past Johnson to get to the buffet to set the pitcher down and when she did allowed the entirety of her person to press against him. And surely he would have been otherwise so affected in this now empty dining room where her womanhood had meshed into its rightful place against him that he would have just grabbed her and taken her lips against his. But his street senses were too alerted by what was going on in the living room; whoever was at the front door had caused Kitt to react with a jolt that Johnson could see all the way from where he stood. And now it bothered him that they were taking too long to either come in or leave, and Kitt’s tussles of locked hair pushing up from her yellow-and-green headband seemed hysterical as they flew from one direction to the other as Kitt moved her head from side to side talking to whoever it was.
Instinctively he counted the men in the room, told himself to settle down, as he reminded himself that there were at least three cops in there. “Yo, somebody get Kitt’s back,” he yelled in, and the men immediately pulled their attention away from their plates and their hounding ways and now from Sage who seemed to be in the middle of a convulsion she was jumping and spinning so out of control that it enticed some of her playmates to do the same. Verdi ran in the living room then to get to the children before they collided and hurt themselves, and the half-a-dozen men in the room had circled Kitt at the door, providing an impenetrable barrier should there be a need to block someone’s entry into the living room, and something told Johnson to just stand where he was, to not join the others in the living room, and then he knew why as the barrier of men parted, and through this aperture in walked Rowe, right through the door on into Kitt’s house.
Rowe. That goddamned motherfucking Rowe. How many years had he spent boiling over the thought of that pompous, conniving, lustful, old, old, motherfucking Rowe with his Verdi? His. And how many more times did the ambivalence of having to admit that Rowe had saved Verdi’s life when he himself couldn’t, when he himself had been responsible for her descent, when having to ingest that thought that he handed Verdi over to Rowe threatened to sever once and for all the tenuous grip he had on what was left of his reality, threatened to leave him a babbling imbecile just walking the streets dehumanized to be laughed at or pitied for the rest of his life?
He didn’t even think about what to do as he watched Rowe go straight to Verdi who was on the floor now with Sage, rocking her, calming her down. And even though he felt the coals of a vengeful fire reignite in the pit of his stomach as Rowe leaned down and kissed Verdi on the cheek, he knew that sometimes the real strength of a man was exhibited in his ability to just walk away, the way he’d had to just walk away from Verdi twenty-some years ago when to stay in place would have meant the death of them both. He walked away now so that he wouldn’t complicate Verdi’s life tonight, so that Rowe wouldn’t look up and see him standing there and assume that they’d planned some luscious rendezvous, especially since Verdi was so innocent, they both were tonight. So he walked away from the buffet in the dining room, right on through the kitchen, right past Posie who was running water in the sink, right into Kitt’s therapy room, where he didn’t even turn on the light, where he just stood and leaned against the mauve-colored wall and allowed the vanilla hanging in the air to calm him down.
Verdi didn’t stay long after that. She left before they opened the gifts, sang “Happy Birthday,” cut the cake. Rowe’s unexpected presence in Kitt’s Sansom Street row house caused a disharmony in the air. Though he came in smiling, congenial, extending his hand to the men who’d been prepared to take him down on the first sign from Kitt, Sage’s agitation didn’t really dissipate, and the other children never completely resettled back into their dining-room spaces, which pulled the parents and neighbors from their free-forming flow in the living room. Plus Kitt’s disconcertedness was all too showy. She started dropping things, losing her train of activity, she couldn’t even remember names when she proceeded to introduce Rowe around.
So Verdi didn’t, couldn’t stay long. Just long enough to excuse herself from Rowe. “I need five minutes alone with Sage,” she said as he nodded and stood stiffly in the middle of the room trying to act as if he belonged here, as if he’d been invited. And Sage clung tightly to Verdi’s hand, whimpering, gasping after having cried so as they walked toward the kitchen. And Posie met them at the kitchen door and ushered them into the kitchen asking what had upset grandmama’s baby so. She pulled out a chair and took Sage on her lap and rocked her back and forth, the whole time looking at Verdi, talking to Verdi without benefit of words, using her eyes she let Verdi know that Johnson was just on the other side of the door, right in Kitt’s therapy room. Posie better than anyone knew what it was like to be so fibrously in love when convention suggested otherwise. So she used her eyes to tell Verdi that she understood, really and truly understood how badly she must want to go in there, but that she couldn’t, not now. And Verdi just stood there staring at the door, and then ran her finger lightly across the vanilla-colored wood as if it was his chest she was touching. She turned around then and Posie’s eyes were closed now as she rocked Sage back and forth and Sage had settled down as she stroked the ends of her grandmother’s hair and enjoyed the feel of the rise and fall of her chest.
Posie opened her eyes as Verdi walked past and Verdi mouthed goodbye and blew her a kiss. Posie nodded, put a finger to her lips, and closed her eyes again.
Verdi wouldn’t meet Kitt’s gaze though as she got to the dining room. She went straight to the closet and grabbed her leather jacket. “I’ll talk to you next week, cuz,” she said more to the closet than to Kitt. She wasn’t sure what she was feeling toward Kitt right now, gratitude, anger. How long had Kitt been planning this, this, shock that could have stopped her heart and killed her, that’s how unsuspecting she’d been, how unprepared, and apparently so was Johnson. Angry, she thought, yeah, she was angry at Kitt because she’d truly set her up, just disregarded her wishes when she’d insisted that she couldn’t see Johnson, just couldn’t, she was still too bitter over the sight of his back the night he left her, too weak. Suppose Rowe had bounded in there ten minutes earlier, and what was he doing showing up there anyhow? She was about to transfer her agitation from Kitt onto Rowe, but right then she crossed the archway where she and Johnson had danced with their palms; she breathed in deeply as if that helped her to honor that space. She felt her anger draining away into an infatuated confusion.
Rowe stood at once when she entered the living room, and she cast around her goodbyes to the gathered, a college hoop game on the television had their attention now and even the children, exhausted from the outbursts precipitated by Sage, sat mostly uninvolved at their parents’ feet. Rowe looked blandly around the room and waved to one or two people symbolically. “Have a good evening,” he said, then opened the door onto the enclosed porch so that they could leave.
The air had changed outside, the sun had closed its lids for the day and left the night to take over with its clear-eyed perfect vision. The earlier wind yielded to a chilly calm that was so intense it was startling. Verdi shivered as she looked up at the sky and tried to pick out the Big Dipper from the more than usual constellations offered up tonight as Rowe rushed to open the car door for her.
He stood in front of the door then and blocked her path, took her face in his hands and mashed his lips against hers. He lingered over the kiss and then pulled her in a close hug, confusing her.
“I’d better let you in before you catch a draft,” he said, moving aside and helping her into the car.
He got into the car and just sat with his hands on the steering wheel. “I hope you don’t think I was out of line coming over here like that,” he said, staring at the wheel as if he were seeing it for the first time.
“I was just shocked,” Verdi said. “That’s why I reacted the way I did, you know jumped up when I realized that was you leaning over me and then that just got Sage all riled up again.” She tried to sound as if she had nothing to explain about her behavior, but she explained it nonetheless. “I mean, I know how you feel about Kitt, that’s why I got ready to leave as soon as you came in but I needed to spend some time with Sage, it’s not good for her to stay in an agitated state. And as it was I hadn’t even been there for very long, I mean I couldn’t even tell you all the people who were there.” She stopped. Looked right at him, at his profile that looked so studious and little boyish to her now as he sat there and stared at the steering wheel as if the wheel held the answer to some deep, complicated problem. “Why did you come, Rowe? What was that all about?”
The inside of the car was quiet save the keys tinkling as they hung from the ignition. He leaned back against the headrest. “I don’t know what made me come, really, Verdi. I was asking myself that all the way up here. I just started thinking after you left how maybe I have been overly harsh and unfair in my treatment of your, you know, her.”
“Kitt. You mean Kitt, right?”
“Yes.” He breathed in deeply, audibly. “Kitt, your cousin, Kitt. Though I must say she doesn’t take the prize on friendliness. She barely let me in, and only did after a barrage of questions about my motives. She even asked me if I was there trying to start something since she knows how I feel about her. And what got me is that I didn’t challenge her, you know I was very, very polite. So no, I’m not sure, really, why I came, except that I hate it when you leave the house upset with me like you did today, and quite frankly I was worried about you trying to get home by yourself on public transportation. Look how dark it is around here.”
“I would have, could have gotten home, Rowe,” she said quietly. “I’ve been coming up here for twenty years and I’ve always gotten home.”
He turned toward her then. His knee hit the keys and they jingled with a clarity and a rhythm that sounded like a musical instrument warming up. “And you’ll keep coming home, won’t you? Promise me you’ll always come home.” And even in the unlit car she could see the longing on his face, as if she were very, very sick and he was begging her not to die, as if he knew, but what could he know, she didn’t even know.
“Rowe, what is it? What’s wrong with you?” she asked, wanting to stretch across the armrest and burrow his head in her chest and take away the pleading in his face, or wanting to confess, the way she always ended up confessing to him from the time when she’d confessed to being strung out. But what would she confess now, that she’d just been shocked by the reappearance of her long-ago lover, that she’d been ambushed by the onslaught of twenty years’ worth of feeling that had continued to percolate in all that time? That she would see him again, had to, even if just once to tell him that she couldn’t see him again? How could she confess that? Better that she was dying. She folded her arms across her chest. She couldn’t let herself soften toward Rowe right now, too risky, at least not until she had a chance to be with her thoughts. “Well, if you aren’t going to tell me what’s got you acting like this,” she huffed, “can you at least get some heat going? It’s freezing in here.”
“Get some heat going?” he said, mild sarcasm running through his voice, angry at himself now for groveling like this, and at her for evoking this feeling in him that he was losing a grip on her hand, that her hand was sliding from his and she would fall if that happened. “For you? Anything for you,” he went on, the sarcasm building in his voice like a train working up to its best speed. “It’s all for you. Everything I do is for you. And you ask for so little too. Just get some heat going is all you want.” He started the car and flicked the heat to high and a gush of cold air smacked her in the face.
She turned the vent away from her and raised her jacket collar up around her face and felt as if she wanted to cry. They turned off of Kitt’s block and she looked out the window at the pockmarked block they cruised through now where the well-kept, freshly painted house struggled to keep its dignity next to an abandoned boarded-up shell. She started to comment to get a conversation going, but she really didn’t want to hear his overly assured rhetoric about this neighborhood’s decline being the fault of the people who live here. But on the other hand she didn’t want to just sit in here and think about Johnson and try to process it all either. He might be able to hear her thoughts quiet as it was in here. And he was already picking up something. He was even driving faster than usual, so fast until he had to brake abruptly at the stop signs and red lights. Johnson had told her once that they purposely don’t synchronize the traffic lights in poor black communities just to add to the frustration of the people so that the people are always stopping and waiting. Now she felt the jerkiness of the stop-and-go in her stomach and now too the reality of it all hit her like the blast of cold air just had and she put her hand to her mouth so that she wouldn’t gasp out loud. “Um, Rowe, I’m feeling like I might be sick on my stomach,” she said. “Could you slow down a little.”
“Do I need to pull over?” he asked.
“No, it’s just the jerking back and forth.”
“I’ll slow down then,” he said, resignedly. “Simple request, simple action. Though I guess this means you aren’t up for dinner, probably had too much unhealthy eating on your plate at your cousin’s, maybe that’s what’s got your stomach upset.” The sarcasm in his voice was yielding to concern.
“Actually I didn’t have a chance to eat. The food had just been put out when you got there, we were just in the process of helping the children to eat when you got there.”
“So then you are up for dinner?” he asked, a lifting to his voice.
“Sure, I mean, you’ve got to eat anyhow, sure,” she said.
“Where do you want to go, want to go down to Penn’s Landing, or what? Do you feel like some music? What do you feel like?”
“I don’t know, whatever,” she said, wanting really to just go home, just take a shower and plead a headache and curl up and pretend to fall asleep to the hum of the television while she really relived the evening, the way they’d touched palms, and Johnson, the way he just walked away to spare her, all of them, a scene. But she would go out to dinner with him, she would try to be pleasant, she told herself, not gushing, not over-the-top, but personable enough while she worked to submerge the guilt that was starting to flow a little higher than the rest of her crowded consortium of feelings. She would be nice. She owed him that much, she thought as he crept along now so that she barely felt the motion of the stop-and-go.
Verdi didn’t know that Johnson was in trouble the fall of her junior year. Thought his weight had fallen off over the summer because his mother had moved to San Diego to try to lift her spirits with her other son. Thought he was moody because of the stress of working that UPS job and still trying to maintain otherwise. She wouldn’t have known a track mark if he’d put a flashlight to his arm and traced it with his fingers, and as dark as he was it would have taken that. So she didn’t have an inkling that he was up to a bag a week, sometimes more than that depending on whether he could shake the desire when it came down on him. And even when the fact of the matter was being shouted right over her head she still didn’t know.
She and Johnson and Tower and Cheryl were playing pinocle this Saturday night, partners, she and Johnson against Tower and Cheryl. It was October and the air had already adopted a wintery bite but Johnson had the windows open in his low-rise dorm. And Tower got up and closed the window. And Johnson accused him of stalling on taking the bid. And Tower just sucked the air in through his teeth and passed. And Verdi passed and so did Cheryl and the weight was left on Johnson. So he named his trump and got back up and opened the window while everybody put down their meld, and Cheryl said, “Come on, Johnson, what’s up with you and this infusion of cold air, you trying to give Verdi signals on what you got in your hand?”
Johnson pinched his nose as he sat back down to the game, said, “No, it’s just hot as hell in here.”
Tower looked at Johnson then, at his half-closed eyes and the perspiration outlining his forehead, his droopy mouth; he slapped his hand on the table, said, “I can’t do this shit no more, either you got to move or I got to fucking move ’cause I can’t do it.”
And Cheryl studied her hand, rearranged her cards, braced herself. And at first Verdi thought Tower was just playing around, talking trash as he was inclined to do especially during a card game.
But then Tower stood, kicked his chair against the wall, said, “Which one of us is it gonna be, man? Huh, ’cause you fucking around.”
And now Verdi saw that Tower wasn’t playing and said, “Tower, what’s your problem?”
And Cheryl stood now, grabbed Verdi’s arm. “Verdi, I think we should go, this a roommate thing and I don’t think we need to be here.”
Johnson just stared at the cards fanned out in his hand. Laughed a slow throaty laugh. “Go ahead, baby, Verdi, go back to the high-rise, I’ll be there soon.”
Tower was banging the table in front of Johnson. “After all your rousing speeches about not letting them fuck with your mind, not letting them give you a diminished view of yourself, not falling prey to their diabolical tactics, look at you, look at you, you had the motherfucking world in your hand and look at you, man. I hate you for doing this to yourself, man. Why’d you let ’em do it to you, man?”
“Tower, what are you talking about? What is wrong with you?” Verdi’s voice screeched as she ran to where Tower was, to put herself between Tower and Johnson.
“Move, Verdi, this has nothing to do with you,” Tower said as he put his hand around her arm, pushed her out of the way.
Johnson jumped up then. “I know you didn’t just put your motherfucking hands on my lady,” he said, stabbing his finger in Tower’s chest.
Verdi was jumping up and down, yelling at them to stop, and Cheryl opened the door wide, pulled Verdi through the door, telling her come on, come on, this is between them, come on.
And when the door slammed shut sealing just Tower and Johnson in the small living room of that low-rise dorm, the chilling air wrapping them like a cyclone, Johnson dropped his hands to his sides and Tower started to cry. He grabbed Johnson by the chest of his sweatshirt. “Come on, man, fight, hit me, hit me, you motherfucker, aren’t you the one always quoting ‘Invictus,’ dying, but fighting back, where’s your motherfucking fight? Where’s your fight, man? You let them rob you of your fight. Why you do that shit, why you let yourself get strung out, you junkie motherfucker, I hate you, man. I hate you.”
Verdi was stretched out on her bed, Charity sitting cross-legged in the corner of the room, when Johnson got there. Verdi had just described the scene, Johnson and Tower about to go at it, best friends, like brothers. And Charity said, “You’re so sweet and naive. I just love your spirit, don’t you see it, you haven’t seen it, it’s the girl that’s come between those friends.”
“Girl? What are you talking about, Charity? What girl? Who?”
“Not a who, my confused friend,” Charity said as she uncrossed her legs at the sound of a knock on the door. “Though I have known men to worship her.”
And Verdi was about to ask her what she meant, but decided instead to answer the door because Charity could sometimes go on for an hour explaining something that Verdi would conclude was nonsense, and she assumed that would happen now, so she let Johnson in, and Charity said she was going to spend the night in the roof-top lounge with some of her friends, they were going to trip and hope for high winds so that they could feel the room shake.
Verdi looked at Johnson then, at his half-closed eyes and his face that was shallowing right in front of her and his stature even crooked and leaned over and she helped him through the door and asked him what was it, what? And what was happening between he and Tower? And had he taken some kind of downer pills as slow as he was moving. What? What? What was wrong?
And he told her that he just felt sick, that he just wanted to crash, could she please help him get to bed so that he could crash? He was whimpering and she undressed him down to his skin as if he were a six-foot infant and spoke soothing phrases and gave him a sponge bath because he looked so dusty to her, then she squeezed into the bed with him and couldn’t understand why, but a brick came up in her chest and she started to cry.
Johnson woke the next morning mildly restored. He still felt dopey under his skull but at least his synapses were firing and returning a semblance of rationality to his thought. But now the feel of Verdi’s naked body wrapped around his was both soothing and devastating. Soothing because her nearness was always a transcendent experience for him; devastating because of what Tower had said to him, about him losing his fight, giving up, becoming a junkie. A junkie. And now he was afraid that what he’d become had leaked from the inside and was now staining his exterior the way a leaky pen drips indigo blue clear through from the pocket in the lining to the beige breast front of a new linen suit. He rushed to cover the stain, to hide it under a handkerchief when he realized that Verdi was awake now; he smiled.
Her drowsy eyes came to focus on his face and made him feel warm and comforted in a delusional way, as if everything was the way it had begun with them, so honest and clean and unspoiled.
They were nestled under the blue-and-white covers and Verdi whispered, “Church?” And Johnson tightened, was afraid that the pillars might come crashing down if he had the nerve to step his lying, sinful, drug-addicted ass into a church right now.
“Why don’t we, you know, lay low this morning, baby?” he said into her mouth as they faced each other wrapped up like a turban knot.
They agreed then that they wouldn’t pry themselves from the softness of the sheets, of each other, to get up and go to church. And Johnson nestled again into his delusion. It had been a long week for both of them they agreed and they would just sleep in this smoky Sunday morning and turn the forced hot-air heat to high and open the window about a quarter of the way because they liked the sensation of the cold and hot air mixing at their heads. They would snuggle this morning, they agreed, and listen to the intermittent bursts of traffic down on Walnut Street along with the mellow sounds crackling like a slow-burning fire from the radio. Roberta Flack was singing “Our Ages or Our Hearts” and they watched the fog push through the window and settle in over the bedroom and take the edge off of things.
That’s when Verdi quoted Rowe, something benign and meaningless about never being able to really catch up on sleep you’ve missed. But just the fact that she was quoting him at all turned Johnson’s mood from the soft delusion that everything would be fine, to biting, prickly, and he lit in right then to insult Rowe, tried to cloak the insult, his sarcasm, his insecurities in a joke. Said, “Yeah well, that Negro looks like he don’t lose no sleep with his corny argyle-vested ass. I know he’s probably ’sleep by nine. Probably sleeps in starched pajamas too stiff as he is.”
He laughed to hide his bitterness, but Verdi could see it all through the misty-colored air: his bitterness, his sarcasm, his insecurities dangling as a group from his smile that hung on his face like a weak crescent moon. She’d been feeling Johnson’s insecurities a lot lately whenever he’d start in on Rowe. She wondered where it was coming from. Was beginning to fathom that Johnson was actually jealous of Rowe.
So she changed the subject from Rowe. Started talking about herself and Johnson as a couple instead. “I looove love love you, Johnson” she said as they faced each other on the twin-sized dorm bed, the covers pulled up over their chins so that their words were streams of heat bouncing between them. “All my love is just for you, no one, no one but you.”
“Yeah right,” he said, half-jokingly, wanting, needing to hear the confirmation of her love for him. “You can just tell me anything because you know you put a trick on my mind, you know you got me under your spell.”
“Wrong. My auntie and cousin are always teasing me about how much in love I am.”
He thought about Bug’s orange vinyl couch when she said the part about her cousin and her auntie. Wondered if they’d seen through his weak promises by now that he would never touch that stuff again. Wondered if they’d tell Verdi and unspill her from his life. He cleared his throat and stiffened under the covers.
She circled her arms around to the small of his back when she felt him tighten like that. “Johnson, baby, please tell me what is it?” she asked as she breathed into his chest.
“I just feel like I’m losing you.” He only said it so that when she told him it was over for real, he’d be able to point to this moment, and say, see I told you you would leave me. He thought this even as he struggled to get Bug’s couch out of his mind because then he wouldn’t have to think about the contents of the miniature wax-paper Baggie that he had hidden in the inner lining of his pea coat. But now he did think about it and his insides were responding to the thought with a jittering that he fought to keep at bay. So he blended the truth of how he did feel about Verdi with the lie of what he’d been doing, stirred them around in his words so only streaks of truth showed through. “You know, Verdi, even if you’re getting ready to split on me, part of your mind, you know it’s like it’s not linked to my mind anymore, like take for instance that joker, that mf-ing history Joe you always quoting, it’s like he’s serving up a little brainwashing along with the history lesson. You know. As if he’s locked onto some part of you that I don’t reach anymore. It’s disturbing, baby. Just the thought is messing over me. I can’t even think straight when that thought takes ahold of my mind.”
“Johnson, how can you say that?” she asked in a voice markedly louder as she propped herself on her elbow. “Rowe is, I mean, he’s you know, he’s a damn professor is what he is.”
“No, he’s more than that,” he said as he drew his finger along the outline of her chin. “He’s got a prominence in your head that you don’t even realize. That’s what bothers me the most, how subtly he’s trying to get a lock on your mind, my baby’s mind. I’d rather die and go straight to hell than lose any part of my sweet, sweet, southern baby—” His words went low and crackled from the top of his throat so that he sounded as if he were moaning.
Verdi pressed herself against him, convinced now that Johnson was somehow ascribing to Rowe’s grossly diminished view of him. That he was internalizing Rowe’s opinions about all the ways that Johnson was unfit to be a student here, certainly not measuring up to be a suitable object of her affection. She wondered right now if Johnson was beginning to think less of himself as a result. Hadn’t she studied the looking-glass theory in ed psych? And not just Rowe either, what about the other professors, the administrators, even his white classmates, what about all the people with whom he interacted in a single day, how many of them made Johnson see a lesser image of himself, that he was less than them, less bright, less capable, less industrious, less honest, less clean, less worthy? When she thought about it now, even his walk seemed less deliberate on some days, it was either erratic, as if he were in a hurry but not quite sure where he was even headed, or reduced to a stride that was more the shuffle of the downtrodden, not the purposeful gait of her Johnson, the one who taught her things, put new dimensions on definitions she’d taken for granted. Right now it was as if she could feel Johnson’s insecurities as a whir of circles in her own stomach. But not her too. She couldn’t—wouldn’t—allow Johnson to feel insecure about her love for him, her passion.
She pushed back down under the covers, her voice dropped to a whisper. “As God is my witness,” she said. “Rowe, or no other man for that matter, has any part of me that’s not already dedicated to you; even if you haven’t gotten there yet, it’s waiting for you, baby.” She worked her hands then to draw him out, to consummate this moment, this declaration, so that there would be no doubt in his mind. His manhood was slow to rise though. Had been slow lately she’d noticed. So she worked her words right along with her hands. “Just a flash in my mind of our togetherness and a smile hints at even my most serious face,” she said as she tickled the bulge in his neck. “You know, I have to shift in my seat, or if I’m standing I’ve got to squeeze my thighs together, fold my arms tightly in front of me so that the sudden erectness in my chest doesn’t show. Look down, got to look down, baby, because if anyone looks in my eyes at that instant they might see what I’m seeing too.”
She talked slowly and easily as their bodies entwined under the covers and they whispered sonnets to one another of everlasting adoration. And she was able to draw him out, finally. He throbbed against her and slid in and out and gurgled and pulsed and finally came in a stream that sputtered more than it gushed.
She was on her elbow again looking down at him as his breaths settled back to normal. He looked so tired to her right now, dusty and ashy the way he looked when he’d fallen through the door last night, as if even his virility was seeping away right before her eyes, and at the same time something about the way he lay there wasn’t relaxed in a drained and satisfied way, but it seemed to her as though he wanted to jump out of his skin. She knew that part had nothing to do with Rowe. She wondered now if any of it had anything to do with Rowe. She asked him then if he was okay. “For all your talk about losing a part of me, it’s like I can almost see you disappearing in chunky, definable segments,” she said.
“What are you talking about, baby?” he asked softly, seriously, not wanting to lose her concern that had just swathed him and held him and made him feel reborn. His breaths quickened though at her question, and he started to cough.
“What am I talking about?” she asked as her voice cracked, suddenly, unable to carry the revelation that had made the brick come in her chest the night before and made her cry, that she now knew meant that she’d been closing her eyes to something, she didn’t know for sure what, only that it must be significant. And now as she watched his chest heave in and out so that he seemed to be gasping, her memory was racing like a silver ball in a pinball machine, scoring, flashing lights and jingle bells, landing in the clown’s mouth racking up points, hitting on image after image of Johnson over the past few months, always late, always exhausted, broke, broken, dragging, always dragging.
“What am I talking about?” she said again, louder, voice filling with irritation. “You tell me what I’m talking about. Something about you is not right, so you better tell me just what the hell am I talking about?”
“Verdi—”
“You been lying to me, Johnson.” She cut him off as she sat all the way up in the bed. Now she was out of the bed, naked and unashamed standing up over him. “What is it, Johnson? Some other woman tying up all your energy? Is that why you have excuse after excuse over why you can’t half get here?”
“Verdi—”
“Is that why you always broke though you supposedly working so much overtime?”
“Verdi—”
“Is that why you can’t even come right, can’t even fucking get hard?”
“Verdi—”
“Is that why you gonna throw up Rowe in my face, just to deflect attention away from you and whatever you’re doing?”
“Verdi, Verdi, please, Verdi, you’ve got it wrong.”
“Well, you better put it to right, then. If I’ve got it wrong, you’d better put the shit to right.”
He swung his legs over and sat on the side of the bed and hung his head in his hands. He patted the space next to him, asking her, needing her to come sit beside him as he thought about what he should do. He knew what he wanted to do right now. More than anything he wanted to get to the contents of the skinny wax-paper Baggie in the lining pocket of his navy pea coat. His insides were jumping uncontrollably now at the thought. His naked body was cold and he hugged his arms across his chest and looked up at her and begged her to please come sit next to him. If he could have her warmth against him right now maybe he’d have a chance at talking his insides into being still, maybe he wouldn’t convulse uncontrollably as he felt himself getting ready to do. “Please, Verdi, please.” He begged. His words were soupy as he tried not to cry.
She just stood there. She was cold now too in her naked skin as the outside air was winning over the warmer gusts pushing up from the heater. She went to the window and slammed it shut, calling herself a fool as she did. “Why didn’t I see it? Why didn’t I see it?” she asked out loud, not sure what it was she hadn’t seen so she just assumed it was another woman especially the way Johnson sat in a heap on the side of the bed as if he were in the process of collapsing even as his words streamed out and she wanted to cover her ears, hadn’t Charity said something about a girl last night, she didn’t want to hear it, because as long as she didn’t hear it maybe it wasn’t true. So she braced herself praying that it wasn’t some woman she knew, maybe someone who smiled up in her face on a daily basis, maybe some tall, lithe, stunning beauty, maybe even a white girl, please God don’t let it be a white girl, she thought as she listened for the spaces between his words, but his words had no spaces as they gushed forward, nor did they hold some woman’s name, just Bug this, and Jones that. And what was he saying about Jones? And Bug told him how sweet it would be, and it was sweet—
“What?”
“It was so sweet.”
“What tell me what?”
“The only thing sweeter has been you.”
“Johnson, tell me what,” she yelled. “What? Tell me what! Right now! Tell me what you’re talking about!”
And he told her then what he’d been doing, how it had started out on Bug’s couch just to be cordial sociable, to lift his mood. And before he knew it he was popping it under his skin once a month, then twice. Always turn-ons at first though, always free, he said. Until it became a regular thing, a three-even four-times-a-month ritual and he started paying Bug good money for nodding time on his couch. He wanted to stop, every time he’d done it lately he’d sworn to himself it was his last. But it was so sweet to him, the only thing with which to even compare this incalculable sweetness was their time together.
He was crying now, confessing to Verdi as if she wore a clergy’s robe even though she was naked and cold as she came and sat down next to him. And now he was begging her to help him. “Help me, baby,” he cried as if he were praying to a God who really could help him and since he didn’t know how to invoke the name of a real God he just called Verdi’s name over and over again and gave her the power to save him in that instant as their bare bodies shook against each other even as he broke out into a sweat.
But Verdi couldn’t help him. Not even a little bit. It was unfair of him to ask; it was much too much of him to ask. She wasn’t his God, as much as she studied her Bible, went to church, knelt down on the side of her bed before she went to sleep at night; as much as he admired her apparent goodness. She was just a confused college student out of her element since she’d been here, and since she had survived here, lulled into believing that she knew what she was doing, knew how to take the appropriate action when the man she loved sat next to her naked and convulsing saying that he had a jones, asking her to take it away. “Take it away, baby, please. Please take away this jones.” And since she wasn’t old enough or wise enough to understand that she could never save him, never could save anybody, that all she could do for him right now to really help him was offer to call student health, his adviser, his mother, the Pennsylvania Institute for the Mentally Ill. Then open her dorm-room door, ask him to leave her university apartment, to leave her entire world because she couldn’t quell his cravings, nor should she, would she serve as their substitute. But she was only nineteen, only so smart. So unwise. So she did all she had the capacity to do at that moment, as her lips turned blue because she was so chilly even as Johnson leaked his sweat all over her, and he held her so closely until her chest was closing up and her breaths went thin and she started to cry and she thought the only way to help him, to save him was to understand him, understand what he was doing, had done. He could barely hear her when she said, “Show me, Johnson. Show me what you’ve gotten yourself into. Show me, Johnson. I want to do it too.”
And had Johnson been more right-minded he would have denied her, even pushed and shoved her away if need be, he would have said no with a finality that she couldn’t beat down like the way he said no when she’d beg to go with him when he went to buy their weed because he knew he couldn’t keep her safe in some drug house. But he wasn’t in his right mind, a fog still hovered over his brain from the day before yesterday’s high and then having that high turn on him and make him sick when Tower confronted him. And now the itch was starting that was the surface of his skin warning him that it had to be soon, that this itch would spread from outside in to the next layer of his epidermis, down on through his muscles, that his brain would crawl like his skin was now if the liquid music wasn’t soon to start, that even the very core of him would cry out needing relief. So it wasn’t a decision he made with his right mind as he reached into the lining pocket of his pea coat and pulled out the wax-paper Baggie with the dull white contents, so beautiful that bag looked to him, more beautiful even than Verdi. Nor was it a decision he made with his heart, because right now he had no heart, was incapable of loving anything except the contents of that wax-paper bag.
He was skilled and clinical as they sat together on the beanbag pillow in the center of her bedroom floor and he told his insides to be still, his turn was coming up soon. And Roberta Flack’s voice oozed from the radio and the forced hot air whirred through the vents. He didn’t talk, didn’t instruct Verdi the way he did when she’d first smoked joint, or sipped the head off of a beer, he didn’t say you put this in the bottle cap, that in the spoon, he barely breathed as he traced his finger up and down Verdi’s vein and let his thumb rest against the thickest one; the one that pulsed like a heartbeat. And then he tied the rubber tourniquet tightly just above her elbow, and he extended her arm and droplets of sweat shimmered on the vein highlighting it so that it was so easy to see even under the fog of the morning sky that hung over the room and watched in horror as Johnson pierced it in. All the way in. And Verdi squeezed her eyes shut and made a sucking sound as her rich healthy blood, O-positive, the kind the Red Cross begged for because of its versatility, her blood splashed around in the needle head furiously appalled and trapped.
And surely Hortense felt it at that instant as her breath caught at the top of her throat and made her cough and choke and spit into her lacy handkerchief even as she sat on the front pew and looked up as her husband began to pray; and Leroy felt it as a thud in the center of his chest that made him pause and clear his throat and then the words “Our Father” wouldn’t even come. Kitt felt it as a squeezing in and out around her temples so that she started undoing the rollers in her hair. And Posie felt it as a shaking in her hands that made it impossible for her to smooth on her frosted lipstick right now. Even Rowe, sitting at his kitchen table unfolding his Sunday paper this morning, could barely see through his eyes to the print on the page though he boasted often about his perfect vision. They all felt what Verdi couldn’t feel right now as she sang along with Roberta Flack that it was okay for Jesus to change her name. “Whew, shit, change it, Lord, ha, ha, ha, ha.” Then she sang some more as her head bobbed around and the air in front of her turned thick and smooth as cream, she laughed that laugh that Posie had heard in Johnson that sounded like a death rattle. She didn’t hear it as such though, didn’t hear much of anything right now except pings of metal firing one after the other in an orgasm in her head that went on and on and on even as she nodded off into the milky blue.