The maroon Grand Am was familiar to Johnson now as he slid in behind the wheel. He could adjust the radio without looking, sprinkle the windshield with cleaning fluid minus all the fumbling for the controls, the sideview mirrors were set to his liking; it was as if this was his car as much as he’d driven it since he’d been in Philadelphia. Though certainly not a car he would have selected himself had he gone into a dealership and stood in the middle of a showroom and watched the salesmen in their too-tight suits rush him because everyone knew how easy it was to exploit a black man buying a new car, the Grand Am had a nonpretentious homeyness about it, almost as if it should be his, with a four-year note attached, not the short-term monthly rental fee.
Verdi should be his too, he confirmed to himself all over again as he glanced at her snapping her seat belt into the silver clasp. She should be more than these borrowed hours he was allotted with her where if they were in public he couldn’t even hold her though sometimes the desire to take her head against his chest was so intense that his shoulders ached. And now it was more than his shoulders that were aching, it was all of him because his time in Philadelphia was just about up. The season for their togetherness was slipping through his fingers though he’d cupped his hands, tried to hold on to their contents, their time, but what hadn’t oozed out through the spaces between his fingers was quickly evaporating; seeping, or drying up, either way his hands were almost empty of this, their season, and he hadn’t even been with her in a way where he could take his time, fully express the mountain that had sprouted over his heart because his heart alone couldn’t hold how he felt, hadn’t been with her purely and honestly without the complications and the guilt that her ties to Rowe kept in the air between them.
They had only driven a few blocks and he could tell by the rhythmic spaces in her breathing that she was falling asleep. “Watch your neck, baby,” he whispered as her head dropped forward and then she sat up with a jolt. “Put the seat back, go ahead and relax before you give yourself whiplash.”
She reclined the seat and nestled against the fabric upholstery and went into a quiet snore, and Johnson was impatient for the light to change so that he could just drop her off at her house, or at least at the corner of her house. He tightened his hand around the steering wheel at the thought of having to drop her off to Rowe, couldn’t get around that it seemed, from twenty years ago until now he was still dropping her off at Rowe’s feet.
He looked over at Verdi sleeping so soundly now. He relaxed his hand on the steering wheel as right then, instead of keeping straight on Chestnut Street just ten more blocks to turn to go where he’d drop Verdi off on the other corner so that Rowe wouldn’t see that he, Johnson, was the driver of the car, he turned instead, turned on red and went north, went directly to City Avenue, to the modest leased apartment with the slightly tattered tweeded couch that was his for only one more week.
He just sat in the car once he pulled into the blackened parking lot in the space that had become familiar to him too. He listened to Verdi’s sleeping breaths and thought about what he should do if she woke and tried to claw his eyes out for being so audacious as to bring her here. He guessed that wouldn’t happen though. Verdi had always been so easily led down paths she knew were wrong, that had always excited him about her; he’d loved her for that, and now he was acknowledging for the first time, he’d hated her too, hated her for not holding on to her right mind, for not resisting more, for not tying a rope to a tree and then hurling him the other end so that he could have climbed out of the cesspool he’d made of his life; he did hate her for that, for being so weak.
He remembered Posie’s words then when she’d apologized to him for putting him on a pedestal and then hating him for falling from a place where he had no business being anyhow. It was as if he could hear Posie in this car, in his ear, telling him that he owed Verdi such an apology too.
And now that he’d thought of Posie in that context he allowed himself to feel the terror he’d put a cap on while he was trying to be strong for Verdi and Kitt. Damn. Posie. “Please don’t die,” he said out loud. He was rushed with an onslaught almost as if it was his own mother for whom he’d returned too late to say good-bye. He gritted his teeth to hold it back, but he couldn’t hold it back and he let go a cracked sob, and then another one and he covered his face in his hands and it was that sound that startled Verdi awake as she sat up and looked around confounded, trying to see where the hell they were.
“Johnson, Johnson, what is it?” she asked frantically as she squinted through the darkness and found his arm and shook it. “Is it my auntie? Tell me, Johnson, what’s wrong?”
He didn’t answer, stretched across the bucket seat and found her mouth instead, could taste his own salty tears running into her mouth as he covered her lips with his own, she didn’t resist, pushed back with her mouth, until he couldn’t stand it anymore and said, “Come on, baby, come on, let’s go inside.”
They were out of breath by the time they practically burst through his apartment door. And once the door slammed shut and sealed them in the tiny living room an unfamiliarity descended as if they were about to become entwined for the first time. They stood facing each other; Verdi looked at her fingers, curled and laced her fingers. “Maybe I shouldn’t be here,” she stammered, “it’s so late and Rowe doesn’t even know—”
“Maybe you shouldn’t be anywhere else but here,” Johnson replied as he interrupted her and moved in closer.
“But, um, but I need to, I mean, what about, um, Rowe—”
“Fuck Rowe.”
“But you don’t understand—”
“I understand that my project here is just about done, I’ve done the foundation work, Troubled Waters is a real entity now, you know a grant writer comes in after me. I have no other reason to stay here now unless you give me one.”
“No! Done! My God, why you just springing this on me, how much longer?”
“I can milk it for another week, but essentially I’m finished.”
“One more week? You don’t mean you’re leaving town in one week.”
He had her face in his hands. Such a panicked look to her face. Such a small, helpless face. “I’m—I’m just floored, it seemed as if you’d be here, you know, at least through the summer, I mean where next, oh God, don’t let it be someplace all far. Awl. One week? No! Shit!”
He kissed her face as she spoke. Her face was so pliable as it just yielded to the press of his lips. How could he have ever expected her to save him? So unfair, even hostile of him to have hoped for that, she was just a girl, not even ripe in her womanhood, just a bud on a branch, an embryo, not even born, and he had hoped for her to save him. “I’m sorry,” he said as he kissed her lowered eyelids.
“Well, don’t be sorry, just don’t leave.”
“It’s not the leaving I’m sorry about, Verdi, not the leaving this time anyhow. I’m sorry because I put you where you never belonged, then I hated you for not holding your position, for not stopping me, for giving in to me, I’m sorry, I’m so, so sorry. You never belonged there.”
“Where do I belong?” she asked him and the air surrounding him as her eyes looked beyond him into the dark living room, thinking that’s how the days ahead of her would be, dark and formless like the living-room air if he were no longer here, no longer this close.
“Right here, baby. At least now, tonight, this moment, you belong right here.”
They stopped talking then. They tore at each other and pushed and squeezed and panted and gasped. They were rough and fervent and clawing and biting, and Johnson tried to slow it down, to go at it at a milder pace, but Verdi pressed her heels into his back, she so wanted—needed—for it to be ferocious right now; tenderness could come later, right now she just wanted Johnson to fill her up, fibrously, she could even let him go, retreat back to her safely packaged life with Rowe, she could spend a million more nights with Rowe if right now Johnson could fill her up, if he could be the one to take away, take away, please could he take away that dot of desire that started burning when she’d misread his eyebrow, could he? Could he take it away? “Please, please,” she started begging him and the sound of her voice like that made him come in a rush, and she did too, and in that instant as her center burst and spewed glitter that caused reverberating tingles wherever it landed she thought that she had actually hit her vein, that she was getting off not on Johnson, but from that poison that she’d once enjoyed in her vein. “Oh my God,” she cried as she clung to him, not allowing him to move. “Please God, no, no, no, no. Please God don’t let me want it again, Lord. Not like that. Never again. Please. Lord. No.”
Johnson didn’t understand, thought she was talking about him, being with him, thought she was begging the Lord to take away her desire for what they were doing right now, not what they used to do when they’d plunged needles into their arms and thighs. And since he misunderstood her he told her to go ahead want it. “It’s okay, Verdi,” he moaned in her ear. “You can want it, want it, go ahead and want it, baby, I want it too, all the time, I want it so bad I want you to leave your old man, I want you to come with me, if you want it, you’ll come with me, will you, Verdi? Do you want it that badly? Huh, how badly? I love you, Verdi Mae, so much, so much.” He was still inside of her and she was still holding on, squeezing him so tightly, and he started to kiss her face as he asked her, begged her to leave with him. And his professions of love and her squeezing him like that were making him throb all over again inside of her and he started moving again too. “Will you? Will you leave with me? We can even stay right here in Philly, but you got to leave him to be with me. Awl, Verdi, baby, please, please, please leave him, please be with me.”
“I can’t,” is all she said, all she could say, certainly couldn’t explain it, couldn’t tell on herself that after all these years she wanted to get high again. Couldn’t make him understand that it was Rowe who had protected her from that, and who else but Rowe would protect her, especially now, especially after feeling an enticement for it just now.
“I can’t. I can’t. I just can’t. You don’t understand. I just can’t.”
Johnson went limp then. Pulled himself from her and sat on the side of the bed with his back to her.
“You love him?”
“It’s bigger than just a question of love.”
“What is it, a question of debt?”
“He has kept me safe.”
“What are you, a lamb, you’re a grown woman, Verdi, you’re forty fucking years old, you make your own way, been making your own way, what? Is he the one telling you that you can’t make it without him, if so that’s shit, Verdi, pure bullshit. He hasn’t kept you safe, he’s just kept you. Period.”
“You wouldn’t understand, I mean you left, you got yourself together on your own, Rowe did it for me. Sometimes I think that it was his presence more than anything else that’s kept me from wanting to get high.”
“His presence kept you from wanting to get high? Whew!” he said, sarcasm making rings around his words. “That’s some heavy shit. Who the hell am I to compete with that. Damn. Yeah, you’re right, you better stay with him, I damn sure can’t promise you that I can control your desires. I know I don’t have that kind of power, wouldn’t want that kind of power over another human being, a pet maybe, a fucking collie, not another person though. Damn, the power to control someone else’s desires. Mnh. He’s a bad motherfucker. Scary too. Mnh. That’s some scary shit.”
He didn’t say the rest of what he’d been thinking. That if Rowe’s presence took away the urges for her, then maybe his, Johnson’s, presence was inciting it. He was even remembering now how fidgety she’d gotten on the porch when they were talking about the drug corner, had thought then he’d have to ask her about that, but then the thing happened with Posie and it was pushed completely from his mind. He didn’t mention it now. She might admit to it, might entice him into thinking that he could save her, that kind of scenario would have them both nodding again. He would leave sooner than later. It was better for them both if he did. “You should get up so I can drop you wherever you need to go,” he said, his words feeling like wood coming out of him. “To the hospital, to him, wherever.”