We were on the boardwalk in Santa Monica, underneath the shadows of the Ferris wheel and all the other kiddie rides. Below us, the Pacific was rolling wave after wave into the fine sands on the beach. Air filled with laughter and the scent of cotton candy. A brother who passed by with his little girl high on his shoulders was what helped me stutter and stammer my way to my moment of truth.
A minute ago, Dana was snuggled with the butt of her wide-leg Levi’s tight against the buttons on my 501s, and I was kissing flesh that was smoother than a Billie Holiday tune. Now her face looked like she’d never smiled a day in her life. Or would never smile again.
“Hold on, let me make sure I heard what I just heard. You’re telling me you’re married? And you have a child?”
“Divorced. Yeah.”
“Why did you wait this long to tell me?”
“I’m facing the truth. Everything that is faced can be changed, and nothing can be changed until it’s faced. James Baldwin—”
“Just what I need,” she said, cutting me off with who-gives-a-shit sarcasm. “Another quote. You can save that bullshit.”
I rubbed my beard as if admitting that was stupid.
She winced, then spoke in a soft and numbed voice. “Give me the details. Tell me the real deal.”
I gave her the Cliff Notes to that portion of my life.
The sun was dropping from the skies, changing the smog-gray skyline into a magnificent hue of peach and strawberry.
Dana blew air so warm it fogged; her insides were on fire. “Womack and Rosa Lee and their daddy and her kids know about this marriage?”
“This is my mistake. They told me to tell you when we met.”
“Duh, hello. Why didn’t you?”
“Fear, I guess. I couldn’t handle you not liking me.”
“What, is this supposed to make me like you now?”
Harsh looks. Regretful expressions. Anger. Shame.
Dana continued, “What’s her name?”
“Kwanzaa.”
“Your wife is named Kwanzaa?”
“That’s my baby’s name.”
“Your ex-wife’s name is . . .”
“Malaika.”
She looked at me, remembering that name. Remembered it from a week ago at church. Dana showed me how precise her memory was, said, “Love at first sight, competition, conquest, contempt.”
I added, “A very unhappy ending.”
Dana fingered her hair. “So, now I know. How old?”
“Twenty-eight.”
“I meant your baby.”
“Five.”
I told her that Malaika had remarried and left the country; I hadn’t told her that part yet. I was giving information in doses, seeing how she digested each spoonful before I gave her the next. She looked like she was being force-fed castor oil.
Dana strolled away, dabbed sweat away from the tip of her nose, moved in short steps like she had shackles on her feet.
I followed, moved a little slower, gave her room.
She asked, “You’re paying C.S. and alimony?”
“No alimony.”
Crackling was in my ears, the sound from a wooden bridge that was burning under my feet.
Abruptly, Dana laughed a hard, very not right, belly laugh.
“What’s funny?”
“I misunderstood you. I thought you brought me down here”—she took a breath—“because you were about to ask me to marry you.”
“I want to marry you. I asked you to.”
She waved her empty ring finger. “Not officially.”
Time went by. Wasn’t much. Just a corner of forever.
She forced a smile. “I’m glad you’re an obligated brother. Most of ours don’t take care of their own.”
“White man does the same thing. Black people don’t own sin.”
We were moving toward people fishing on the backside of the pier, facing Palos Verdes and miles of open ocean. She hardball pitched a pebble over the railing into the ocean. Lowered her head, then raised it again.
She said, “I told you my daddy went back to his first wife.”
“Yep.”
I threw a pebble out into the waters, south toward Venice Beach. I wished that everybody’s past could be tossed away so easily.
She mumbled, “Families always break up because of some bitch. Brothers walk when they get tired of the pussy, or a woman becomes inconvenient.”
“Sisters walk too. Switch up in a heartbeat.”
She ran her tongue over her bottom lip. Her blackberry lipstick was almost gone. “When we met, I asked if you had kids. You said no.”
“I wanted to tell you. I didn’t know how.”
“What do you mean, you didn’t know how? There were one thousand ways you could’ve told me. You could’ve left a Post-it on my front door, left a message at my job, sent an E-mail, faxed, called on my car phone, did a beep-beep-beep on my pager, could’ve wrote a letter, sent a postcard, or even better, you could’ve been a man and told me.”
“Did you tell me all about you in the first fifteen minutes?”
“I didn’t share every little detail, but I told you enough.”
I said, “Well, I wanted to be sure you were the one.”
“So, all this time you were using me to get off.”
I didn’t say anything. She was the one who had showed up at my place, undressing and with the condoms, but I carried the blame.
“Look, I’m going to be honest. My last relationship with Claudio”—she stalled when she said his name, frowned as her tight eyes became opaque—“was a wasted five years. That was a big chunk of my life that I’ll never be able to get back. It shouldn’t take a man five years of laying up with somebody to figure out if a woman is right for him.”
“I know. We’re on the same page.”
“I don’t know we’re on the same page.”
“Why not?”
“Because it shouldn’t take a man half a year to tell me he already has a family.”
“They’re in Germany.”
“I don’t care if they’re on the third ring of Saturn. You still have a family.”
“If you want to cut your ties, I understand.”
“What, you think my emotions are a switch? When something goes wrong I can click that unwanted feeling off? It don’t work like that. I love you. I can’t unlove you in two seconds. I can’t act like we never met.”
I couldn’t bob or weave out of the way of her words.
She wiped her nose, asked, “You have pictures of your little girl?”
“Yeah. A couple.”
“Never seen ’em. You’ve been hiding ’em.”
Then Dana complained about being cold, and we drifted back toward my worn-out 300ZX. We headed east up the 10, left all the yuppies and people with green and purple hair in Beach Town, USA, got off at Crenshaw, headed over the rough and uneven pavement toward my home.
“Your car stinks like gas.”
I said, “Fuel injectors must be leaking.”
“A lot of things are leaking. Starting to smell.”
I parked on the south side of Stocker, away from my building and nearest Leimert Park. Dana was still practicing being a deaf mute. The area was packed, hardly anyplace to park because Raleigh Studios had about twenty eighteen-wheelers down in the mouth of the park, filming a movie.
We walked across the street, Dana in front, moving slowly. Neighbors sitting on stoops, a couple walking a pair of identical pit bulls, heading toward Audubon Middle School. They saw us coming. Read the tension. Backed off.
One of my landlords was standing in their bay window. Naiomi. I recognized the crescendo of her breasts, the curves in her silhouette, saw her good enough to make out the shape of her head, braids, and to tell that she had on tight jean shorts and a midriff top.
She checked out Dana’s aggravated body language. I pretended I didn’t feel Naiomi’s energy, didn’t acknowledge her shallow wave or her curiosity.
Before I met Dana, I used to wish I was Naiomi’s type, wished that because she seemed so damn easy to get along with. Divorced with a kid, just like me. Lonely days made me want her so bad that I fantasized about her tipping over to see me in the middle of a warm summer night.
But that was back then. I’m wishing on things that would make my present so much more pleasant.
At the top of the stairs, my landlords’ door opened. Juanita came out, golden hair hanging straight, no makeup on her face, dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt that had red letters that read PUT WOMEN IN THEIR PLACE—FIRST PLACE.
She looked across at Dana, then down at me.
I said, “What’s up, Juanita?”
“Three garages were broken in tonight. Not ours or yours, the people across the way. Two cars were stolen. Last week a couple of cars were broken in out on the streets too. Dana, your car is nice, so be careful and try and park in front of this building. It’s safer.”
Dana replied, “Safety and love are both illusions.”
Juanita’s eyes went from Dana to me.
Dana chuckled. “After tonight, I won’t be parking on Stocker.”
“Why is that?”
An awkward moment.
Juanita tendered her tone and asked Dana, “You okay?”
I came up a step or two and said, “Everything’s fine.”
“I was talking to Dana, Vince.”
“And I’m talking to you: everything’s fine.”
Another one of those moments happened between me and Juanita.
She went on, “If you need anything, Dana, let us know.”
Dana said, “Vince, the door please? My bladder.”
Inside the huge living room of my one-bedroom apartment, after Dana had gone to the bathroom and come back, and a lot of minutes with no words had gone by, I asked, “What’re you thinking?”
“Melting clocks. I’m thinking about melting clocks.”
I didn’t know what that meant, but the way she said it was soft and agonizing at the same time. A second or two went by.
She asked, “How long have you had that bedroom furniture?”
I shrugged. “Five, maybe six years.”
Dana made a negative sound; blue devils were dancing in her lungs, swimming in her blood. She said, “So, you’ve been screwing me on the same furniture you laid with your wife on. That seems blasphemous.”
For a hot moment she wanted to go off, but she pulled herself inward and subdued her rage as fast as it came. I curled my bottom lip in, wondered how many men had left semen stains on her sheets, how many condoms had been flushed down her toilet.
I offered, “I can get something new, if that’ll make you feel better.”
“If that’ll make me feel better,” she mocked. “It’s kinda late to worry about my feelings.”
I felt so bad. Never felt so low.
“Let me ask you something,” she said, then cleared her throat. “Did you ever videotape you and your wife when you had sex too?”
She asked me that out of the blue, caught me off guard. I almost admitted that I’d dabbled in some video fun with my ex-wife, but from the look on Dana’s face, now wasn’t the time to add any more coals to the fire.
“Nope. Never taped anybody but us.”
“Where’s the tape?”
My insides jumped, made me think she had read my mind. “What tape?”
“The one of us.”
“In the closet.”
“I want it destroyed. You might be one of those perverts who would send X-rated crap over the Net.” She rocked, did nervous things. Then in a no-compromise tone she said, “Get the pictures of your child.”
She watched me go into the back of my closet and pull out a legal-size golden envelope. A VHS tape crashed to the floor. I played it off, kicked it to the back of the closet, then closed the door.
I opened the envelope, showed her the photos of my child.
Her voice turned tender when she said, “Only four snapshots?”
“Malaika took everything else.”
“Wedding pictures?”
“Everything.”
The unraveling of me hurt. Nobody was gunned down with a .22, but a finger was on the trigger and the night was young.
Dana said, “She’s pretty. Nice-looking child.”
I didn’t know if she meant that, or if that was what people were supposed to say when they looked at the pictures of a newborn baby.
She asked, “Is Malaika a twenty-five twenty?”
“A what?”
“Is she white?”
“Nope. She looks more Creole than black, though.”
She went on, “What you’ve told me doesn’t make sense.”
“What doesn’t make sense about it?”
“Help me connect the dots. You said she abandoned you and married somebody else before the ink dried on your divorce papers. She never calls, never writes. Doesn’t all of that sound kind of suspicious?”
“What do you mean by that?”
Dana was checking out my child’s walnut complexion, round face, and slanted eyes. No expression. Totally unreadable.
She asked, “You ever take a blood test?”
“No.”
“So you’re not sure it’s your child?”
“What, you know something that I don’t know?”
“You never took a blood test after you found out she was messing around. You said you didn’t know how long she’d been messing around.”
I emphasized, “She looks like Malaika.”
She studied the photo. “Your ex-wife must be pretty.”
That rang out like a trick statement, so I didn’t bite. She gazed at my child’s image until her eyes watered, then eased the pictures down and stared at me. Didn’t blink.
I said, “What’s wrong?”
Her lips barely parted. “I’m thinking about the big picture. This would be one hellified, complicated relationship when they came back. When we went to bed last night, when we made love, when we woke up this morning and made love again, while we sat at Boulevard Cafe and ate breakfast, while we had all that fun, in my mind there were only two people in this relationship. Now . . .”
A moment passed. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying this plate is looking mighty full. I thought it was only me and you, but you’ve opened a friggin’ day-care center on me.”
“One kid. I only have one kid.”