Drinking Coffee Elsewhere (18 page)

“Is she, like, sort a medium height? Long hair like yours? Pretty brown eyes?”

Tia put down her fork. “Where is she?”

Dezi laughed and waved his hand. “Naw. I don’t know her.”

She began to hit him, slapping at him wherever she could, but he caught her, hugging her so that her hands would stop hitting him. She wrestled with him, inflamed that he could keep her down without much effort. “Hey. Hey. Hey,” he said. “I didn’t mean to joke like that.”

She had never hit anyone that way, but doing so made her feel closer to Dezi, as though they’d weathered some ordeal together.

He told her about Gerard. “His mama’s an addict. A
real
addict. She suck your dick and shit.” He looked at Tia, eyes apologizing for the language. He shook a Newport out of its package and lit it. “I give them kids money, and you know what? All them other kids buy candy and shit. They money gone”—he snapped his fingers—“just like that. Not Gerard. He take that money and get on the MARTA. He buy him some chocolate bars like schoolkids be selling and go to white neighborhoods. He puts on a little limp and gets some big TB-sounding coughs going and say he’s selling for the Leukemia Foundation. Them white folks eat it up. Homeboy buys his own clothes, shoes. Not fancy ones. Just ones that fit.”

“Sounds like he’s a good kid.”

“Hell yeah.”

“Sounds like you’re setting a good example for him.”

He turned on the TV as if to tune out what she’d said. The TV movie was one in which a kid gets left home when his family goes on vacation. Burglars come after him, but he eludes them at every step. Dezi laughed the whole way through, sometimes actually slapping his knee. When it ended, he said, “Next time you run away, do like that white kid and unstring some pearls. Then when dudes be chasing after you, you can trip them up.”

T
HE NEXT
morning, before he left, Dezi told Tia that maybe she should go home. It baffled her; he’d seemed so intent on making her stay. He tried to give her money, but she refused. Dezi paused at the door’s threshold, taking her hands in his, and seemed like he was going to tell her something, but didn’t.

The previous night, Tia had slept on the couch, Dezi on the bed. She’d thought she’d woken once and seen him staring over her. The
only light was that of streetlamps, filtered through the window blinds so that Dezi’s face seemed to be caged. But in the dream, when she tried to speak, she couldn’t say anything, and when she tried to move, she was unable to. She assumed it had been a dream, assumed that if it weren’t a dream, he would still be standing over her come morning, but he wasn’t.

After she showered, Tia took out her clarinet and began playing from
The Marriage of Figaro
. She loved fingering the succession of B-flat–C combinations that sounded like a tickle. The succession began to go up a half-scale that fluttered into a series of alternating D’s and E’s. Then the waterfall of the music began. The trumpets had the main part for a while, and she had never had a need to play it. In band, the clarinets sat back and played whole bars of
tut-tut-
tut-tut
while the trumpets did their thing, then the flutes, then the baritones. Tia tried to play the trumpet part. She pressed variations of the silver side keys that looked like the lazy flats they played; she tested the round finger keys that circuited the tube’s holes in halos of thin metal. Within an hour, she had figured out the trumpet part and played it, then replayed it. She went into the bathroom so that she could look in the mirror as she played, but she was so proud of herself, she couldn’t get through three bars of music without seeing a goofy smile creep up around her mouthpiece.

She left the bathroom and was about to put the clarinet away when she saw a woman sitting on Dezi’s sofa. She did not know how the woman got in, but there she was, swallowed up in the velour folds of the couch, shins spread like a colt’s. She wore a purple fitted jacket with a tiny purple skirt, a set of keys fanned out against her thigh. Her hair fell about her shoulders in thick black waves, and her pockmarked face was covered in makeup a shade lighter than
her neck. She looked up at Tia, not startled so much as studious, as though Tia were an enigmatic painting.

“Who are you?” Tia asked. She realized she was holding the clarinet like a spear.

“Who am I? Who the hell are
you
?”

Tia waited a while before answering. “I’m a friend of Dezi’s. Are you a—customer?”

The woman pushed herself from the couch and stood up, walking into the kitchen. “Naw, I ain’t no customer. What the hell make you think that?” Water ran from the faucet, the fridge opened, bottles and jugs and wrapped packages sounded as if they were being thrown onto the counter.

She came back into the living room, where Tia was still standing, still holding on to the clarinet. The woman had a good half of a bologna sandwich hanging from her mouth. Through the bread and meat she asked, “How’d you meet Dezi?”

Where one might have expected a blouse underneath the purple jacket was nothing but an expanse of chest and cleavage. Her earrings dangled, grazing her shoulders. She laid what was left of the sandwich on the arm of the couch and began to unbutton her jacket.

“I’m
hot
. You hot?” She undid all five buttons and took off her blazer as though Tia were merely a curious pet. She stood nonchalantly in a lacy purple bra, sighed, then picked up the sandwich again. During bites she muffled, “I don’t even have to ask if you hot. Black folks always hot.” She swallowed another bite of sandwich. “Plus you dressed like you fell off the Amish wagon.”

Tia looked down at her blouse and skirt, but before she could even think of a response, the woman fanned herself with the sandwich hand and said, “Good God, I wish that boy’d get some AC up
in here!” She stopped fanning and eating long enough to pick up Dezi’s forgotten Newports. She peered down the hole ripped through the top, pried one out, then crumpled the empty pack in her fist.

“I met Dezi a few days ago when I was looking for a job. He said I could stay for a while.”

“Ohhh ho.” The woman smiled, lighting the cigarette. Two columns of smoke swirled from her nostrils. Her head bobbed up and down, amused.

“He didn’t tell me he had a girlfriend.”

The woman laughed, then pushed Tia’s shoulder as though they were longtime friends. “Baby, you don’t even know which end is up!” She laid the burning cigarette against the saucer of the coffee-table plant and steered Tia to the couch, sitting her down. She sat next to Tia and made a smiling pantomime of introduction, daintily offering a bejeweled hand. Tia shook it, sending the woman’s bracelets rattling.

“My name is Marie. What’s your name, Miss Lady?”

“Tia. Tia Townsend.”

“All right, Miss Lady Tia. You didn’t exactly answer my question, so let’s start over. How did
you
meet
Dezi
?”

Tia blinked hard, trying to remember. Although it had only been two days ago, it seemed like much longer. Her head flooded with many lies she could have told, but the way the woman sat, in her purple bra, her eyes the sort even liars couldn’t lie to, she blurted out the truth. “I ran away from home. And I didn’t have a place to stay and he said I could stay with him. If he’s your boyfriend or something, I didn’t do anything. I swear—I mean, you’re not supposed to
swear
, but I
promise
I wasn’t trying to be his girlfriend or anything.”

Marie picked up her cigarette and stared at the airbrushed skyline on the wall, then embarked on a long series of thoughtful puffs.
She quickly turned to Tia and said, “Wanna sandwich? I didn’t even offer you no food, girl!”

Tia declined.

Marie put out the Newport in the plant’s saucer where it sizzled in the water and died. “Well,” Marie said, turning to Tia as though she was trying to make her understand something she should already know, “Dezi and I are business partners. And I don’t push no drugs, either.”

Tia nodded her head slowly, now comprehending, but to be sure, she used the delicate term she’d heard her great-aunt Roberta use. “Are you a lady of the evening?”

This sent Marie howling, her head shaking back and forth like women in church getting happy. “Girrrrl! I ain’t heard that word since I was sporting pigtails in Savannah! Who taught you that!”

Tia said quietly, “I just learned it somewhere.”

Marie kept laughing, finally ending it with the luxuriant sigh of one who’s had a good time. “‘Lady of the evening,’” she said in bright soprano. “You must a come a
long
ways from home.”

B
EFORE
T
IA
left the apartment, she folded up the sheets and blankets she’d slept on and placed them in a soft cube on the couch. She left a note for Dezi saying that she thought it was time for her to go back home. She did not mention that she’d found out that he was not only a drug dealer, which was bad enough, but a pimp. She knew she was not going back home, but she had to tell him something to explain why she’d left. She thought about going back to the park, then going to the far south side of town where well-off black people lived. Surely someone there would take her in.

She sat in the park but hadn’t the energy to play music for money.
She watched for what seemed like hours as the park groomers cut the lawn; in the wake of huge riding mowers, the grass stretched in a carpet of green, reminding her of the cemetery near her home in Montgomery. She looked down at her open clarinet case, the pieces of the instrument glinting limousine black in the sunlight. She was filled with a sickness and longing, wanting to hear the simple sound of air blown through a wooden tube. Her clarinet case and backpack were too cumbersome to carry around the city, and she tried to think of a place to store them while she searched for somewhere to sleep for the night.

Then she remembered the bus station lockers. She found out how to take the MARTA from Stanford Gardens to the bus station, and there they were in front of her, a row of lockers with combinations. She put her change into an empty locker and was about to lift her case when she saw the photocopied flyer on the next locker. “Missing,” it read, and below the large lettering, despite the poor copy job, she could make out her own face, a picture of her from junior high, her smile forced from the school photographer.

“Tia!” a voice called.

Tia looked around the bus station, expecting to find her aunt Roberta, the pastor, and church members, standing in unison like a choir. And there would be Marcelle, feigning surprise as if she hadn’t seen Tia since Sunday school.

But it was Dezi, leaning against the doorjamb of the video arcade, wearing a black nylon jogging suit, his gold cross on display. He ran toward her, out of breath, holding roses. “Hey,” he panted. “Got your note but didn’t think I’d find you.”

She hadn’t thought she’d ever see him again, and though she had felt nothing but anger for him that morning, now she felt the relief of seeing someone familiar.

Tia remembered when Marcelle and her mother had first come to Hope and Grace. Marcelle had sat next to Tia on her pew, as if to say,
We will be friends
. Back then, Tia wanted to be mad, to send a look that said, What makes you think I don’t already have friends, but Tia already knew what her own face was saying:
Yes, we will be friends. Yes
.

Tia scanned the bus station. Everyone, it seemed, was too busy trying to catch their buses, trying to find the restrooms and pay phones and food, to notice the flyers with her face on it. She stared at Dezi blankly.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but I’m on my way home. Like you suggested.” She hoped he wouldn’t notice the open locker door, but then again, he might just think she was retrieving something. He didn’t seem to notice the lockers, but he gestured toward her with the roses, and when she didn’t move, threw his arms up in the air, a salesman hating to see goods go to waste. The roses jostled in their translucent plastic. They were typical roses, scattered with sprays of baby’s breath, the roses themselves bright red, petal edges slightly wilted and wine-colored. He walked toward the door where taxis snailed up to the curb and waited. She wanted to tell Marcelle everything that had happened in the last few days, wanted to see Marcelle strain to hide her shock.

No one had ever given her flowers. At first, Tia walked slowly. Then, when the roses in Dezi’s hand seemed within reach, she ran toward them.

O
N THE
car ride back to his place, she made Dezi pull over twice within the space of half an hour. Only when they neared his neighborhood did she tell him about meeting Marie.

“Me? A pimp?” he said, sounding genuinely surprised. “No. I mean. It’s complicated with Marie, but I’m not pimping her.”

“Why are you lying to me?” she asked. “You don’t even know me and you’re lying.”

“Look. All I sell is some good herb and a maybe a little dope on the first of the month. But I don’t sell pussy.”

“O.K. So Marie is just
there
.”

“I told you. It’s complicated with her.”

She was now entangled in something larger than herself. When she’d watched horror movies, it seemed easy enough to know when the victim should leave, run, hide. There were always shrieking violins and threatening, sawing cellos to alert you to danger. But here there were none, and she banged her head against the dash, as if trying to beat sense into it.

“Stop that,” Dezi said. When she didn’t, he put out a hand to cushion her forehead. “Stop it!” he said. “You got Tourette’s or something?”

When they entered the Stanford Gardens lot, Dezi’s car screeched into a parking space, the brakes slamming.

“Look,” he said when they’d returned to his apartment. He turned off his pager. “I’ma only have time for you from now on.”

Though he’d kissed her on the cheek the previous day, this time his lips pressed against hers and it took her a while to understand that she had to open her mouth to receive his tongue. His mouth smelled of smoke and Tic Tacs. He pushed his tongue over hers, and it seemed to be searching out the cavities of her teeth. The vinyl slick of his jogging suit rubbed against her blouse, and his hands shoved the cotton fabric up past her bra. Suddenly she remembered the bra she had on, an old one with tiny, inelegant sprouts of elastic popping from the straps.