HARLEM, NEW YORK CITY, 1927
She looks like a liar in that cocked hat. A lit cigarette perches between her fingers like a dangerous butterfly with smoky wings and a glowing head. My tante says that she is a writer, a prevaricator by trade. Three fey-looking men, dapper in double-breasted suits and the gleam of entitlement and intelligence in their eyes, gather around her at one of La Maison Haïtienne’s best tables. Their conversation is loud, punctuated equally by laughter and voices raised in dissent. Her laugh is the loudest.
I come out to take their order and I feel her eyes on me, like hands, warm and over-familiar. The men watch her and laugh, teasing her about a large appetite.
“But isn’t she a sweet looking morsel, Langston?” I hear her ask. Her friend chuckles and says something about me not being quite to his taste.
As I walk back to the kitchen, dark eyes trace the movement of my hips under the thick wool skirt. It is cool in the restaurant, but her gaze burns me. In the kitchen the other waitresses ask about them, what they like, if they are as gracious as they are intelligent. I shrug before walking back out to the tables.
When I lean over to serve her grilled salmon with béchamel sauce, her hand brushes my breast. I jump and the sauce trembles in the bowl, then, as if telling on the source of my surprise, leaks over the opaque black rim of the bowl to dribble on the table in a slow white line toward her. She apologizes and smiles, innocence itself under that wide-brimmed hat. If this were a man doing these things to me, the food would be scorching a path down to his lap by now. But her smile is beautiful. My legs can’t take me fast enough back to the kitchen.
She and her friends keep up a lively conversation as I serve dinner; she talks about going to Africa and doing research on the cultures of different tribes.
I cannot resist commenting. “I don’t understand why people are always looking elsewhere to find themselves. What about home? What’s so terrible about the places where we were born that we rarely seem to want to go back there?” I speak for myself as well as these Negro aristocrats eating at my tante’s expensive restaurant. “How can we expect whites to respect us and our ways if we don’t?”
They look at me as if I were a talking monkey, an exotic prize. Her eyes are still on me, but now there is something more than the hunger.
“You can’t be from New York City,” she says, mouth smiling, eyes finally on my face. “Where did you come here from?”
“Why? Do want to visit my home?”
“Maybe.” Her smile becomes full and radiant. “So are you going to tell me?”
“Maybe.” I walk off to the kitchen to the laughter of her companions.
* * *
It is Friday and she is back, beautiful in another feathered hat and silk gloves. She introduces herself properly this time, then coaxes my name out of me with a teasing smile. “Do you want to go out for a drink?” she asks.
I tell her that I’m working, that I can’t get away, but she offers to talk to my boss for me and convince her to give me time off to play. The writer obviously doesn’t know my Tante Marie. I put her off and agree to meet her after work instead.
For the rest of the day I am nervous with my sweaty palms constantly about to drop dishes. To calm myself, I focus on the memory of her skin with its rich complexity of shades—dark ochre and ebony and cinnamon mixed together on a deep gold palette. One day, if I get the chance, I will ask her to pose for me. My nerves vibrate at the possibility and I cannot wait for evening to come.
My tante knows that I like women the way she likes men, but she doesn’t say anything bad, doesn’t complain. She says that as long as I do the work and manage to be happy then she won’t interfere. We came from Haiti for the freedom to be ourselves, and that meant the freedom to love whomever and however we choose.
* * *
She comes at 1 a.m., dressed in different clothes. I act nonchalant with her, as if I had not spent all day waiting.
“I’m taking you to a party,” she says, touching my arm. “And what you’re wearing is just fine.”
What is she going to do, parade me around like a 1920’s Saarje Baartman, the waitress with a brain? In the car—a loaner along with its driver from her friend A’Lelia, she confides later—she looks me over, sits close, and tells me how pretty I am. Her hands play in my hair, loosen pins until it lies on my shoulders in dark waves. I let her. She takes off her gloves and hat and puts them on the leather seat opposite us. Her hands are cool on my face.
“Do you like me?” she asks, but does not wait for my answer. Her taste is sweet, like a mango in the heat of summer, her arms and throat brushed with the fine fur of peaches. She slides her hand under my skirt and lifts it, chuckles when she finds me wet and ready. Her fingers slide into me and I watch her greedily pushing under my skirt, looking for a place to call home in the wet folds of my quim. She doesn’t mind that I don’t move, that my eyes only flutter half closed as she pleasures me. My breasts feed her thirst, pebble and tremble beneath her tongue and teeth as they jut past the gaping blouse and jacket.
“You taste like caramel cream,” she murmurs into my skin. I forgive her the cliché as her mouth suckles and milks and I shudder quietly in passion. Her fingers plumb deep inside with a noise of decadence and of want spilling into the quiet space. My heart races. My neck bows. The air inside the car is hot. I come with the sound of a thousand sighs.
She’s timed it perfectly. As the car slows down in front of the building she pins up my hair, resituates my hat. She is sliding her own gloves on when the driver opens the door. I know the smell of pussy floats out before us, announcing our pleasure like a red banner in the chill night breeze.
* * *
The party is a blur of faces and mink and gin under sparkling chandeliers. In the front parlor, they tease each other with artfully arranged breasts, scented throats, and pants that cling to firm buttocks and heavy crotches. They deliver on these teasing promises in the back room, laying each other down in groups, and couples, and threesomes, to feed and lick and fuck and laugh. She takes me through these rooms, pointing out her friends, those she’s had before, recommending this one or that for whatever sexual act. The room is thick with sex. The trembling of dark buttocks, a wet exchange of passion, soft moans, high-pitched screams, low growls. All eroticize the air. Her voice is a caress at my ear, but she does not touch me. We leave the loving rooms behind for one of A’Lelia’s many conversation parlors. The black intelligentsia gathers there, sharing gossip, ideas, and glasses of champagne. We settle into a low couch that is already crowded, but people make room for us. She invites me to share my opinions, to show my worth and seduce our sudden audience with my tongue. Her warm hand on my knee lets them know who I will go home with tonight.
“Zora Neale, you were always a selfish bitch,” a woman pressed close to my thigh murmurs through her marijuana haze.
For the rest of the evening, she does not touch me, only watches and smiles. When she says goodbye to her friends, they laugh and tell her to call them next month when she comes back up for air. During the taxi ride back to her apartment, we are quiet and separate on the thick plastic seats. Conversation floats out of her, one sided. She tells me that she is in school, is working on a play with her friends. Her brother will be at the apartment, but that will be no problem. It is all the things that she does not say that make the ride tense. Her gloves are on again. The coat fits her body well. Her eyes hum over me like music, touching in gentleness where they had not before.
“I want to make you lose control,” she murmurs as I step past her to get out of the cab. When it pulls off into the fog-shrouded night, her eyes focus completely on me. “May I?”
“If you can.”
The apartment is warm. She says that it is her one true luxury, this voluptuous heat. For a moment the sight of her taking off her coat and gloves entrances me. I do not notice the other person there. Her brother. He is curled up on the couch watching us. A book lay waiting under his wide-stretched fingers. He is thin and brown, like her. Perhaps one day he will be as handsome. She introduces us, asks if I would like something to drink, and then, when I decline, pulls me away from her brother’s knowing smile into her bedroom.
She turns on the gramophone, lifting the heavy needle to place it on the record. Ethel Waters’s voice settles into the room. Her hands warm as they undress me, exploring the terrain of my skin like an unfamiliar country, as an archeologist coming in for some foreign dig, an anthropologist unearthing a lost tongue. Her mouth is greedy and hot. She is gentle, unbelievably so, as if she herself cannot comprehend the tenderness of her hands, the loving rhythm of her movements.
“I want to know you,” she says, then touches every part of me, each dip and rise of flesh, as if memorizing me. “Tell me how I make you feel.” Her fingers slip into my navel, circling the sweat-slick indentation. Fingertips trace the light fur on my belly, marking me. I can only sigh and moan and shiver.
“Tell me.”
Her mouth settles on my cunt, bringing out the language of my people as she strokes my lips, parts the weeping delta that is my exile on her shores. I tell her in Creole of the mad rush of feelings, like dancing to the pounding rhythm of Vodun drums, when she touches me. How her tongue inside me calls up the tides of the Caribbean and the hot flush of a Haitian sunrise; how in the glory of my highest ecstasy, I hear the chanting voices of my countrywomen and the slapping of feet, the crescendo of all my senses working together until for a moment I am deaf, blind, dumb, my palate without taste, my fingers numb. Until she, in her low voice whispering ‘baby’ and ‘sweetheart’, brings them all rushing back.
* * *
I am addicted to her touch. After three weeks, she is all I can think about. Her skin. Her voice. The spicy scent of her underneath all those clothes. My tante notices my preoccupation and chides me for getting involved with an American when I am leaving for France so soon. I do not tell her that for this woman I am willing to stay another winter in this city, to be enfolded in the cocoon of her sweltering apartment and her even hotter embrace.
But she knows me and so she shakes her head. “Be careful, ma fille.”
“I will.” But I know it’s too late for that. I go to her right after work, not even bothering to change or shower or have my own dinner. She’s all the food I need.
“You’re very cool,” she says, greeting me with a long, slow kiss. Even before I am completely inside the apartment she is unbuttoning my blouse. I never see her nakedness, only the unveiling of her hands and sometimes, if I am lucky, the satin slickness of a slip over her heavy breasts. The dark nipples I can only imagine as they peak and harden under my hands and tongue, always through cloth. So it is her hands that inflame me. When I see her take off her gloves—to eat, to write, to fuck—I blush. Her fingers are long and thick, with clear pink nails that end just before her fingertips. They are unadorned and always accessible to me. She tosses my blouse aside, sees me staring at her gloved hands and smiles with the stretch of her voluptuary lips and a sparkle of teeth.
“What would you like?” she asks, knowing I won’t answer. But she gives me what I want anyway without the humiliation of begging, because she wants it too: the silk-on-silk tug on the end of each gloved finger. Then, as if clasping her fingers together in prayer, the leisurely pull of the glove until her fingers, then the entire hand, is bare. Repeat. Slowly, with the other hand, until my belly is trembling and aflame, my thighs clenching in anticipation of her touch.
“Is this what you want?” Her naked hands flutter over my collarbones and chest, then over the warm skin of my breasts that begs to be warmer still under her. She loosens my hair, my skirt, my thighs, and lays me across her bed. “I have something else for you.”
The lamplight is lush over her skin, haloing its velvety darkness. She waits with her hands resting on her hips as I prop myself up in the bed against thick pillows. Under my eyes her skirt falls away first, the thick textured wool that I’ve felt against my naked flesh a dozen times. Then, with a quick flick of buttons and a shrug of shoulders, the jacket too is gone. Her slip, made of a soft coppery satin that makes her skin shimmer even more in the light, she quickly sweeps up and over her head.
Perfect. Pleasure. Perfection. Smiling face, arrogance itself, knowing that I find her beyond compare, hands once again on hips, waiting for me to speak. But I cannot. Instead I reach for her, pulling her blindly toward me onto the bed, touching her without barriers, tasting her naked skin for the first time. She is delicious. Berry ripe nipples, even darker than I'd imagined, salty sweet and thick. Her flesh, sweat-flavored and abundant, pulling taut under my hands, quivering. And, best of all, the musky scent of her pussy rising, unfettered, from between her legs. She laughs, gusty swells of mirth that stop only when my tongue has burrowed inside her and my hands hug the lyrical swells of her ass, then she sighs my name, offers praises to her god, cries out above me, her thighs trembling like wings. And when she comes I cannot stop. With her still gasping in surprise and delight, I drape myself over her, take her swollen nipples in my mouth, and sheathe my fingers inside her still fluttering cunt.
“No…not yet,” falls from her mouth, but I cannot hear. Her body quickens again despite her protest, and my mouth is ravenous. Her fingers stretch past the sheets and grip the smooth cherrywood of the headboard. The bedsprings sing vigorously as her gasping moans drown out Ethel’s wails. My fingers are tireless. I could love her all night, touch her until our flesh rubs away and there’s nothing but nerves and sensation, two raw naked beings, dripping, drenched, fused together by desire. Too soon she arches up in orgasm, a taut singing bow, then sags into the bed. I climb up her body, straddle her, wash her still trembling flesh with the drip from mine—her thighs, hips, and shivering belly. A world of want shudders through me. She watches as I undulate slowly over the skin of her belly, then up to take hard nipple against me, rubbing my throbbing clit with its firm sweetness until she too moans with arousal. The nipple comes away wet and I want to lick it clean, but there is something else I want more. Her mouth.
I settle onto her lips face with a sigh. She cups me, spreads my lips wide and licks from ass to clit. Her naked flesh calls my hands, even in the lightning storm that fires my body I must touch her, feel the bare lushness of her that has been denied to me for so long. In the coming storm, her ship cradles me, rocking my body on the tumultuous waves as it shakes with tears and another kind of wet. My control is gone.
* * *
The inevitability of our parting is what has made this interlude so sweet. Today I leave, finally, for France. My sister lives there. Already she has a studio set up for me, a room and a garden. She says that I can paint there until I tire of it or of her. My lover has been good, but she grows restless and will soon leave. So I must go first. At the dock, she sees me off, tying a red and blue scarf around my throat. It smells of cocoa butter and almonds. As she does.
“I’ll miss you,” she says. A small lie. She’s discovered something more exciting than love in her anthropology, something that will take her to a place where she needs to be, a place of complexity and reciprocal warmth and strangers to be awed by her. “Please come back when you’ve had enough of France. I’ll write and let you know how I am. Without you all this is nothing. I hope you know that.”
She lies so well. I open my mouth, about to tell her for once of my heart, but change my mind.
“Zora.” My hands reach for hers.
“Djulie.” My name floats above the last call for boarding. Our lips press together and it’s the old fire again. My body ignites easily, but hers is already pulling away.
“Write me,” I say, knowing that she will not.
As the ship pulls away from the dock I watch her from high on deck, the lone brown woman among the pale, waving throng. Her eyes find mine and she smiles. In that clear brown gaze for a moment I wish and I see those letters that she promised. I imagine her closing them with a kiss, and with her name and the love she did not speak of when she held my body in her hands. I wish for the impossible, I know. A foolish wish upon a lying star.