“What? Danny and Danielle are your children?” Tamara asked as they walked past the line of people outside that extended along Peachtree Street to Eleventh Street. “I went to college with them.”
And that fact shook her. It was one thing to cavort with Elliott around people who did not know him. It was quite another for her to know his kids. It was a connection she did not embrace.
Neither did Elliott. He placed his hand on the small of Tamara’s back and guided her across Eleventh Street and into Café Intermezzo, a light-night dessert place that was an after-party haven.
“I thought we were going to your house?” Tamara asked.
Elliott responded without looking at her: “We should talk first… and then see if you still want to go.”
She nodded her head as they were led to a table on the patio that ran along Peachtree Street. Tamara decided she would not say anything and let Elliott take the lead. She was frustrated that the events had diminished her birthday buzz.
“How about some champagne?” Elliott surveyed the extended menu.
“More champagne?” Tamara asked. “What are we celebrating?”
“It’s still your birthday.”
“Yeah, but it’s not like what happened didn’t just happen.”
“I’m glad it did, in a way.”
“I haven’t seen them in two years,” he said. “That’s not the good part. They looked good, didn’t they?”
“You know how crazy this whole thing is for me?” Tamara asked. “How can I look them in the face again?”
“Easy,” Elliott said. “What you and I do is none of their business.”
“That might make sense for you,” she responded. “But it’s bigger than that for me. Danielle and I are friends. And I know Danny. And I’m running around with her dad?”
“When you put it that way, it doesn’t sound so inviting for me, either,” Elliott said.
“Let’s get to the real point then,” Tamara said. “I like you. I do. You’re very intriguing. The fact that you’re older—much older—has not bothered me that much, until now. I need to know: what do you want from me? I mean, what do you really want from me? No bullshit. Why are you pursuing someone close to your daughter’s age?”
Elliott ordered champagne, and then he got right down to it.
“What do I want with you?” he started. “Sex. Fun—”
“Did you say sex?” Tamara jumped in, sounding insulted.
“If you’re going to be in a grown-up situation, you can’t be surprised that a man wants to engage in sex with you,” Elliott said. “I’m not trying to be your mentor on relationships or anything. We both have something to offer each other. But if you think I’m not interested in sex with you, then you’re being naïve. You’re pretty, sexy, smart, fun…why wouldn’t I want to have sex with you?”
At twenty-five, Tamara’s relationship experiences were far less than Elliott’s, but she had never heard a man (or boy) admit his sexual intentions. The funny part was that it turned her on. His candor justified why she believed guys her age were not ready for her. She wanted something different from her girlfriends, something that would open her up and enlighten her. Grow her.
She wanted the truth.
Tamara shook her head while staring into his eyes. “I can’t figure you out.”
“No need to try,” Elliott responded. “We’re all more complicated than we realize. Figuring me out would only confuse you.”
Tamara smiled.
“What I was going to say,” Elliott continued, “was that besides sex, I want fun times, interesting conversation. I want to be taken out of my comfort zone, to have new experiences. I don’t want to feel my age or do things people my age do. That, for me, is living my life.”
“So what have you been doing up to this point?” Tamara asked. “Sleeping?”
“Sleepwalking,” Elliott said. “In some cases sleepwalking, in some cases, struggling…Where do you want me to begin?”
“You know what? Can we save this conversation for your house? I get the feeling you’re about to go in, and we should be chillin’ at your spot instead of around all these people.”
“I’m about to ‘go in.’ Is that what you said?”
“Yes. It means, in this case, to get really deep,” she explained.
“See, this is what I’m talking about,” Elliott said. “You can keep me up-to-date and I can show you old-fashioned things. Balance. I’m not young and hip, but I like to be around young and hip people.”
“But why?” Tamara asked.
“Because it keeps my spirit young,” he said.
Tamara had no response, and after several minutes of chatter about passersby and her birthday, they made their way to Elliott’s car and took the five-minute drive to his high-rise condo in the W Hotel in downtown Atlanta.
“You live here, at the hotel?” she said, trying but failing to conceal her amazement.
“There is a resident portion to this place, too,” he said, trying and succeeding at sounding unimpressed with his digs.
They took the elevator up to the twenty-seventh floor, where Elliott opened the door to his condo that had a breathtaking view of the Atlanta skyline, and beyond, via floor-to-ceiling windows. Tamara was mesmerized.
Elliott threw the keys on a table and offered her a drink.
“Whatever you have will be fine,” she said.
He lit some scented candles that rested on a pair of shelves next to photos of family members. “Make yourself comfortable.” He turned on some music. “You can get what you want. I’ve got to take a shower. Take off your shoes. Relax. Be right back.”
Elliott disappeared to the right of the kitchen into his bedroom, eager to discard his urine-stained pants and freshen his body. Tamara slipped off her heels and took in the majestic view of his place and the city. She opened the sliding glass door and stepped onto the balcony. A breeze cooled the summer night air and added to her calm.
She looked down at the traffic flowing on Interstate 85 and out at the buildings that illuminated the sky. She was a long way from her hometown of Waycross, Georgia, which was closer to Florida than it was to Atlanta. It was a friendly place, a wonderful place to grow up—but a place one had to escape to truly grow. At least that’s how she felt.
Because her family had relatives in Detroit, Tamara’s father insisted she look at schools in Michigan. It was a major point of discord between her parents, her mother preferring that their only daughter stay close.
But Tamara saw beyond life in Waycross and told her mother a month before her senior high school year: “Daddy is right. What is there here for me? I love it here. But for me to not resent it, I have to get away.”
Her mom, even in her disappointment, considered that a mature approach and eventually acquiesced. Tamara received a partial academic scholarship to Michigan State, where she met Elliott’s kids in her junior year. After graduating with a degree in political science, she volunteered on Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign and later earned a job in the Atlanta mayor’s office.
Tamara was ecstatic about her professional life. But she was tortured by her family life. Her dad had developed dementia. One summer during a visit from college he was as he always had been: soft-spoken but firm, funny and sentimental about his daughter. The next summer, he hardly could be trusted alone. His memory deteriorated and he went in and out of awareness more and more frequently. He attended her younger brother’s high school graduation, but no one was sure how much he actually absorbed or remembered.
Seeing him that way pained Tamara, who had always been held up by her father’s strength. She admired him more than anyone. And he was a girl’s daddy. The only time she saw him at conflict with her mother was when he stood up for her in the face of her mom’s overprotection. Thinking about her dad on Elliott’s balcony brought tears to her eyes.
“It’s nice out here, isn’t it?” Elliott said from behind her. He startled Tamara, who wiped the corners of her eyes.
“Beautiful out here,” she said, turning around. “Can we sit out here for a while?”
Instead of answering, Elliott pulled a chair closer to the one Tamara sat down in and retrieved a candle from inside and placed it on the table in front of them.
“I’m into creating a nice atmosphere,” he said.
“No complaints here,” Tamara responded.
Both looked off at the view for a moment. Tamara broke the silence.
“So, what’s up with you, Mr. Thomas? You’re old enough to be my father or maybe even my grandfather. Why do you like hanging out at spots around young people? What’s your story?”
“What’s my story?” he repeated. “It’s a mystery, a drama, a tragedy, a comedy, in some cases. And, I guess I’m trying to get it to be a fantasy.”
“You said a lot but you didn’t say much,” Tamara said, “if you know what I mean.”
She was young, but smart, which made Elliott interested. He had dated many twenty-somethings. Only a few of them held his interest.
“You mean you want specifics,” Elliott said. “Okay, in general, I’ll explain it this way: I have no interest in being a senior citizen. I’m not at that age yet and I don’t like what it seems to mean, which is you’re old and, therefore, have to live a lifestyle that consists of a rocking chair, a sweater even when it’s hot outside, and watching old Westerns.
“I remember my father when he was my age and he seemed to think that meant watching Johnny Carson and going to bed. Well, not me. I always had this sadness about my dad, like he was missing out on life. He never went anywhere. My recollection of him is that he was always this old man. Even when I was a kid he seemed old and settled and not quite like life was treating him right.
“The reality is that life doesn’t treat you; you get out of life what you want out of it. There is too much available in the world, especially nowadays, to be this old man who has his place.
“I don’t have one place. I have a lot of interests and a lot of opportunities and I’m making it happen for myself. Does it look crazy to some, seeing me at sixty-one years old in a club full of youngsters my children’s age? I guess so. A guy called me ‘the old man in the club’ tonight. Guess what? It didn’t faze me. It was true. I wasn’t offended.
“When you live the life I have lived, you are thankful for each day more than most people. I missed out on my twenties. I didn’t get to be young and carefree and enjoy life.
“Well, I have that chance now. I’m angry about some of the things that happened to me. But I am here; I’m still here. So I’m going to do what I damn please. And I don’t care what anyone thinks about it.”
Tamara did not interject when Elliott paused. She was not sure if he was done. But after several seconds, she figured he had said his peace—or all he wanted to up to that point.
“I see you’re really passionate about this,” she said. “What happened to you?”
“I can’t tell you everything at once; it’d be too much for you to handle,” he said. “But I will tell you about what happened with my children, why they weren’t exactly happy to see me tonight.”
“Let me guess,” Tamara said. “You cheated.”
“I could be insulted,” Elliott said, “but I’m going to let it go because you don’t really know me yet. But—”
“That’s right,” Tamara interrupted, “and you said you want to have sex with me, even though you admitted you don’t know me.”
“I said that you don’t know me; I know you,” Elliott said.
“Now how can that be?” she responded. “Never mind—don’t even answer that now… Go ahead.”
Elliott smiled and poured Tamara a glass of the champagne he brought to the balcony.
“Maybe you should go.” He looked away from her.
“Why? I don’t want to go.”
“We’ll see about that,” Elliott said, and the way he said it made Tamara uneasy, but not scared.
“I’m here because I want to be here, Elliott. What happened?”
“You notice that when we talk during the day, I am always out walking?”
“I did notice that. Why?”
“I’m always out walking because all of my twenties and some of my thirties—almost twelve years in total—I was confined. Prison. I had a limited space I could travel. So walking wherever I want confirms that I am free.”
He delivered every word while looking directly into her eyes. He was searching for her emotion.
“What?” Tamara asked. “Why? What happened?”
“They said I raped and killed a woman in Virginia.” Elliott was looking away now, toward the darkened sky, as if it was an enormous movie screen and he could see that part of his life playing out in front of him.
Tamara, meanwhile, was stunned—and scared so much that she was frozen in her seat and speechless.
“You still want to be here?” Elliott asked with sarcasm.
Tamara said nothing.
“I was in my last year of college, at home working in Woodbridge, Virginia at a car dealership for the summer,” Elliott began. “This woman who had come to do a test drive with me earlier that day was found raped and murdered near her home around the time I got off work that evening.
“I was driving back to my parents’ house in D.C. The route took me past the woman’s home. Before I could get to Interstate 95, police sprung up from every angle, with their guns drawn. Scared me so much I was afraid to pull my hands off the steering wheel to roll down the window or open the door. Before I knew it, I was snatched out of my car, on the ground, roughed up and in the back of a police car. I thought I was dreaming.”
Tamara’s fear eased. She was not sure why, but it did. “Why did they think you did it?”
Her question pleased Elliott. She could have asked, as another young lady had, “Did you do it?” Asking the question Tamara did sent the message that she hadn’t judged him.
“It was crazy,” he said. “When her body was found, sometime before I left the dealership, this woman said she saw a man drive away in a yellowish car. I had a yellow 1969 Duster and—”
“A what?” Tamara asked.
“Oh, wow,” Elliott said. “There was a car at that time called a Duster. It was made by Dodge. This was 1971. They haven’t made them for a while now. You’re so young.
“But anyway, they said my car matched this witness’ description of the car leaving where the body was found.
“So I’m in jail and not sure what the hell is going on; no one said anything to me about this crime. So, finally a detective comes in and shows me a photo of the lady’s driver’s license picture. He asked if I knew her. I looked at the photo and said I didn’t. She didn’t look familiar.
“They then questioned me over and over about why I was in that area, where was I going, I mean, just about anything they could think of, they asked me. I left out something, though: I had stopped at this little area that was off the beaten path, not far from the job, down by a lake. I went there to smoke a joint. I got high back in those days. It was a long week and I would do the same thing every Friday—go to this place, loosen my tie and smoke a joint while sitting there in my car, listening to music.
“Well, they finally tell me that the woman in the photo was dead—and that they knew I had killed her after raping her because she was jogging in that same area where I had my joint.
“I’m sitting there looking at them like they were crazy. I stood up and told them I didn’t do it, wouldn’t do it and couldn’t do it. They didn’t believe me. After taking my mug shot and fingerprints and making me feel like a criminal, I was put in a cell and given an arraignment date. My parents, my whole family, was scared and angry.
“But why did they think it was you?” Tamara wanted to know.
“A crazy list of coincidences,” Elliott said. “The lady in the picture was a woman I had gone on a test drive of a car with earlier that day. She had told her girlfriend that she had visited the dealership, and when they checked with my boss, the records showed that I took her on the test drive. But she didn’t look like the photo on her license, which I did not see at the dealership when she had the test drive because an office assistant made the copy of it. Her hair was different and she wore glasses. I didn’t recognize her. And I just did not recall her name.
“But they said I was lying about that, and if I was lying, that meant I was hiding something.
“And they found my fingerprints on her car door. They were there because I walked her to her car when she was leaving the dealership and opened her door for her. They didn’t believe that. They said I opened the door while she was in the car and pulled her out.
“They also said someone saw my car at the lake and saw me sitting in the car as the woman jogged past me. I didn’t remember her. But because I didn’t tell them that I stopped to smoke a joint, they used that against me, saying I knew that if I had told them that I was there, they would link me to being where the woman was.
“It was crazy. My family went broke paying for lawyers to defend me. They lost their house. My father even lost his job because it was a horrific crime. The woman was white, a mother of a young boy, and by all accounts a great lady. I remember feeling that way about her during that ten-minute test drive. She was very pleasant. Anyway, the people on my dad’s job associated my charges with him and didn’t want him around the office anymore. It was a total mess.”
Tamara sat there listening intently, as if she were hearing a storyteller weave an intriguing drama. Only it was Elliott’s life.
“And although so much money was spent and because the crime was so horrible—the woman’s head was bashed in with a tree branch—they had to find somebody guilty of it. And that somebody was me.”
Elliott turned to Tamara and looked into her eyes, eyes that expressed confusion and empathy at the same time. “Do you know what it’s like to stand before a courthouse full of people and be called guilty, knowing you did nothing?” he asked, his voice much softer and poignant. It was as if telling the story pained him.
“I was a total mess. It was unreal, unbelievable. In the newspaper the reporter in the courtroom wrote about me pinching myself after the verdict was announced. I thought I was dreaming and I needed to pinch myself to see if I was awake. I kept doing it, hoping I wouldn’t feel it, but I did. And I started crying. I looked at my family and friends and they were all so upset. It was crazy.”
“Elliott,” Tamara said with sorrow in her voice, “I’m so sorry. I don’t even know what else to say.”
“Your empathy says a lot,” Elliott responded. “I appreciate that more than you know.”
He looked away and took a deep breath. He had not told this part of his story in some time, but with each sharing of it came pain and anger that was so intense he could almost touch it. He was not the most fun person to be around when he was that way. He was sensitive and quick to lose his temper, even thirty years later. But Tamara made it more tolerable because she did not look at him with judgmental eyes and shared no doubting comments or body language.
In fact, she rose from her chair and went over to Elliott and kneeled down in front of him. She rested her arms on his knees.
“I am so sorry you went through that,” she said.
He hugged her, and they remained embraced for a few minutes, neither of them saying another word.