Authors: Sandra Kitt
Leah was once again caught up in his story, except she could hear a tightening in Jason’s voice. A strain that indicated emotions still hovering on the edge. He’d come so far and the end of the story was near. She suddenly felt an intense awareness.
“Jason …” she began very gently. “You don’t have to tell me every …”
“In September I was just leaving family court when I got the call to return to the precinct. Mike had been killed in a school bus accident while on an outing. Three other kids died as well.” The words were said calmly enough, but Jason lifted his head and rested his chin on clenched hands, the left one still holding a long-forgotten cigarette with the ash hanging precariously on the end. He looked at Leah with pain in his eyes, and she knew he wasn’t really seeing her.
“I left the precinct alone. I shouldn’t have, but at the time I didn’t want anyone with me. Not even Joe, my partner. I was thinking, why did it have to be Mike? Why couldn’t it have been me? I found a bar and had a couple of drinks. I thought I felt better, that I could handle it. Then I stopped somewhere else and had a few more. I lost count after that,” Jason said, finally flicking his ash into the tray. “I don’t even remember driving down to Pennsylvania that day. I don’t remember coming back to New York,” Jason murmured. “For the next two days I did nothing but drink and have bad dreams about kids.” He took a long drag on the cigarette and shifted his attention back to Leah. He frowned slightly. “I have no idea how I got into your block. I don’t remember it all. It’s three miles from where I work. I do remember there were kids playing stickball in the street.” Jason chuckled softly. “Do you know I never even heard of stickball until I came to New York?”
Leah knew there were no comforting words to say, nothing that would ease the loss. She signaled the waiter and ordered coffee. And she told him about Kenny.
Had her brother, Kenneth, lived he would have been forty-three. He’d been twelve years older than her, and he’d died in Vietnam. She and Gail, even their father, never talked much about Kenny anymore, Leah realized. She remembered him as an older giant in her life who’d been patient, protective, and loving. He’d wanted to be a lawyer, but was never to finish law school. Leah wondered aloud, for the first time, if her brother’s aspirations would have changed if he’d survived the war the way Jason had. She did remember Kenny being angry about having to go to Vietnam.
“He was just like the rest of us, then,” Jason murmured. “Confused and scared. I mean, nobody understood why we were there. Most of us were just kids, but we had some vague thought that we were supposed to wipe out the enemy, kick some ass and keep the world free of communism. While we were over there we didn’t always understand who the enemy was. We just wanted to get home. It was a hell of a place. Hot. Wet. Miserable …”
“But you did come home,” Leah reminded Jason quietly.
“Yeah. I came home,” he whispered, lapsing into silence.
When Jason took her back to Brooklyn, Leah invited him into the house, but he said no. In a way she was relieved.
“Thanks for dinner. And thank you for telling me, you know … what happened. It must have been very difficult to share so much with a stranger.” She had a sense of surrealism about the evening; it seemed odd that it had even taken place.
Jason just smiled. “We split two bottles of wine tonight. I don’t think we’re strangers.”
In the soft lamplight his eyes were dark and unreadable, but he made Leah feel suddenly exposed. Yet there was a comfortable warmth to them as well. Absently Leah supposed that this evening would end their connection. Jason would go back to his wayward kids, perhaps doing for them what he hadn’t done for his own son. But he took a step closer into her space, and alarm signals went up. He looked carefully at her.
“You
are
a good listener. I like talking to you. Am I going to see you again?”
Leah hoped that skepticism was branded like stone in her eyes. She wanted Jason to see it. She wanted him to see
her,
to see what this really meant. She knew instinctively there was danger ahead. How could there not be? She’d thought that Jason would say he too had enjoyed their dinner and a chance to get to know her. And then that was supposed to be it.
Leah shifted her weight from one foot to the next. “Jason …” she began, but then didn’t know how to put into words her hesitation. Was he going to force her to be obvious?
“There’s no commitment.” He shrugged easily. “There can’t be any harm. Have you ever been to a hockey game?”
Leah wasn’t even sure she knew what hockey was. The question so completely threw her off guard that she only shook her head blankly. Hockey was not a sport that little black girls from Brooklyn knew anything about.
“Tell you what. I’ll call you after Thanksgiving,” Jason suggested. “Maybe we’ll go.”
Leah didn’t answer him as he waved good night and turned to walk away. She couldn’t. She just stared after his retreating form. Jason hadn’t made any promises. He’d only asked a question, but then he’d left before getting her answer. Maybe he’d expected her to say no, Leah speculated. So why hadn’t she? Because only now that Jason was gone did she recognize that inside her mind was a consideration born of a present hope and past disappointment.
In the cozy quiet of her darkened bedroom late that night, Leah knew that sleep was futile. She was curled up under the covers, but instead of being lulled into rest she was wired and alert and fully awake. Her eyes, as a matter of fact, were wide open, although she stared at nothing in particular. Just into space and blackened corners.
As she lay quietly and reflectively she admitted, with a kind of awed surprise, that Jason Horn was the most fascinating man she’d ever met. Their initial encounter and subsequent meeting seemed a complete fantasy, a bizarre twist of fate. They were actually getting to know each other. And she wanted to know more. To Leah, the black and white differences between them didn’t seem to be an issue that needed exploration, since she had no expectations that their acquaintance was going anywhere. She could handle it. Obviously, so could Jason. However, she knew it wouldn’t stay that way if she saw him again.
The recounting of Jason Horn’s life had stirred the embers of her own past. And while she’d felt no need to air the details to Jason, she now lay awake with a score of characters and events appearing from the recesses of her life. Being with him tonight had begun the dredging, because a comparison was forming, despite her best efforts. There had only been a select few males that Leah had ever truly been interested in. Relationships that had all the earmarks and potential for being more than friendship. She had made emotional investments in each one with good, bad, and unexpected results.
When she had been fifteen years old, she fell madly in love with a boy in her ninth-grade class. His name was Billy. He’d never taken her out, never had lunch with her, and had only waited once for her after school. She’d fantasized that one day Billy would marry her. Leah finally got over Billy at nineteen when he got married to a girl he’d met in church.
She lost her virginity her first year in college. Ron had been twenty-five and a graduate student working on a master’s in political science. He was mature, worldly, handsome, and smart. He was also one very angry black man. Ron was verbose and eloquent about the historical injustices done to blacks in America, and spent a lot of time feeling cheated and vengeful. It had been exciting to listen to him speak at first, as he grabbed the attention of a group of coeds and fired them up with his rhetoric and ideas. But Ron ultimately had only one thought, and to Leah it had been singularly depressing. Things certainly weren’t all that good for a lot of blacks in America, but to her mind it was by no means a hopeless situation requiring revolution and a call to arms.
In the final analysis Leah’s relationship with Ron was mostly physical. She had enjoyed his lovemaking, had felt breathless with his inventiveness and willingness to teach her the pleasures of her body and his. But sex, too, was sometimes as quick and angry as Ron himself. They finally broke up when Ron decided that being nonviolent was not going to get him where he wanted to be. He also decided after a year and a half with her that she was bourgeois and an elitist, unaware and uninvolved. His accusations had stung deep. Questioning her loyalties, her priorities, her identity. Leah had spent the next two years marching and protesting on one advocacy issue after another to prove him wrong.
During the summer session in her junior year, Leah had met Philip. He was thin, wore glasses, was serious … and he was white. He’d sat next to her in Spanish class. She’d never even noticed him until halfway through the five-week session he’d leaned over her desk and asked for the translation of a joke the instructor had just recited. Leah had been the only one in class to laugh, being the only one who understood. That night Philip drove her to the subway, but after that, until the very end of the term, he took her all the way home to Brooklyn after each class. She’d lent him her notebooks so he could study, and still he found it hard to keep up. Leah had suggested that he switch to French.
Philip took her out one night on a date. Leah had agreed readily enough, feeling a youthful willingness to ignore conventions. Interracial dating had not yet caught on. They’d gone to Sullivan Street to see a play called
The Fantastiks.
They had dinner at an Italian restaurant and ran into a cousin of Philip’s and her date outside the theater afterward. The cousin was pleasant, but Leah could see she was curious as to why Philip was out with a black woman.
When the two couples had separated later in the evening, Philip and Leah drove through Central Park and ended up in the dark near the boat basin making out. She had the hell bitten out of her bare legs by mosquitoes, but at the time she had not cared. She thought she might be in love again. It didn’t bother her particularly that Philip was white and she was black. As a matter of fact, it was not mentioned even once between them.
Philip said that he wanted to take her to a famous tavern in the Village to celebrate the end of the semester, and Leah looked forward to it. They took the final exam in the college auditorium with three hundred other students. Leah finished first and then waited an hour for Philip to be done. They got into Philip’s car … and he drove her home to Brooklyn. He said good night and promised that he’d call her soon. Leah never saw or heard from him again. For years after she wondered what she’d done wrong. Worse, Leah agonized if spending time with her had just been some sort of experiment for him.
She’d made an analogy between Philip and Jason the first time Jason had asked her out for coffee. She’d wondered if he’d really show up. When Jason had asked her out again, she had known by the time Jason had brought her home that all similarities had ended. Now she lay in bed wondering what she was getting herself into.
And, of course, there was Allen.
Two years ago she and Gail had met Allen at the opening show of silk-screen prints by an artist and mutual friend. Allen had seemed at the time more taken with Gail, but it was Leah he’d asked out and whom he’d begun to date steadily. Leah found Allen good company and intelligent, even if a little stiff and pompous at times. Allen treated her well enough and didn’t make many demands. Neither did Leah ever have many thoughts of wanting more for herself. Allen became a pattern, a fixture, along with other things in her life, like her job and friends and family. He was comfortable to be with … and he was black.
What thoughts Leah had given to the patterns of her life and to the future didn’t necessarily include Allen, but it didn’t exclude him either. The pattern for the time being was set: routine, pleasant, and predictable. If she wasn’t insanely happy she was, at least, content.
But Jason Horn was an almost perfect stranger whom, she was afraid, she rather liked. Jason wasn’t what she was used to, and that was a big part of the problem. He didn’t fit anywhere into the patterns. And if they were to go on meeting each other, she’d have to rethink
content,
and rethink the future and the patterns of her life. She would have to rethink expectations, and reconsider history. Leah recognized that most certainly her life would change.
The patterns would be broken.
Leah was not the only one with unexpected reflections on the evening. Jason walked away from the brownstone feeling a combination of surprise and confusion. Had he really just asked her out again?
Why?
He pushed his hands through his dark hair. The afternoon coffee a week ago with Leah Downey had been nice. Tonight had been even nicer. But Jason had not anticipated anything beyond that. It had just slipped out. Well, maybe not.
Am I going to see you again?
Jason tried to remember the last time he’d been with a new woman without feeling he had to pretend to be someone he wasn’t. Had he asked Leah Downey out again because he felt relieved?
He decided he didn’t have the patience to deal with the subway again to get home. All that peeling back of scabs over the wounds of his life left him feeling exposed. And hyper. He decided to walk home.
He was astounded that he’d revealed so much of himself. He’d really put himself out there, on display. Voluntarily.
Again, why?
Because he knew instinctively that he could not be less than honest. Leah had already seen him at his worst.
His ex-wife, Lisa, came to mind. He thought of his son. Michael had had such promise, so much potential. He was a great kid. Had been. They’d seen each other just two weeks before the accident, and now Jason would never see him again.
Shaking his head to clear it, Jason took a deep breath. He could feel the tension quickly dissolving as it turned into remorse and reflection. Suddenly, all kinds of events from the past three months came rushing back to him, like a film playing in fast forward. That afternoon in particular when Joe had tried to ease the bad news to him about the phone call and Michael’s accident. Jason’s first thought had been to wonder why Lisa hadn’t told him herself. And then losing himself for almost four days, to the pain of helplessness and guilt. To anger and regret.