I wanted to know, “How did you get your condo?”
“Gerri cosigned. I don’t want to ask her to do that again. I want to get something on my own. People are a trip. Even when I offer them a few months’ rent up front, and I show them I’m working and show them a stub, my business cards, they look at me like I’m trying to get over.”
“Well, it’s not a forgiving world.”
“Not at all. Not at all. And these are black landlords.”
“You know we don’t trust each other.”
“With all these black-owned signs up everywhere I look, I would think that they would have some empathy for a sister.”
“Those signs are up so they won’t get looted and burned when there’s another riot. Ain’t got nothing to do with solidarity.”
Seven years with her monkey riding on my back. So, getting a loan for a house, or buying a new car with a decent interest rate, the weight of all that would be on me. I had hoped that with our combined income and credit, we’d be able to qualify for a larger house, in a nice, quiet area.
“When did you file?”
She told me again, let me know that it had been discharged.
She needed to see my divorce decree; I had to see her credit report. That and her bankruptcy-discharge papers.
Then she broke down and told me about her heavy bill from Uncle Sam.
And being delinquent on her desk fees.
There comes a point in every relationship when you realize that the person you’re dealing with isn’t as unblemished as you thought.
I still loved her. Like she said, love wasn’t a switch that could be turned off. It was more like a battery, had to run until there was no more energy left.
I smiled, spoke in a soft and supportive way, “You have less than three weeks before you have to move. Might as well come over here.”
She hemmed and hawed. “Living together and not being married ain’t right. We start shacking, you’ll be getting the milk for free and we’ll never get married. And I don’t want to spend five years cohopulating.”
“Co-which-a-what?”
“Cohopulating. Cohabitating plus copulating equals cohopulating.”
“Nice equation.”
“Learned that in algebra.” She chuckled, then went back to serious mode. “If we shack, and I’m not saying that I will move in here, we should get away from this apartment living and lease a house instead.”
“You just said your credit needs a few stitches.”
She fidgeted. “It would have to be leased in your name.”
“What’s wrong with kicking it here until we get our money right?”
“Well, parking on Stocker sucks. Would be nice to have a driveway. A backyard. Sixteen people live in this building with one washer and dryer. If we had a house, we could split the write-off. If I can’t get Uncle Sambo’s hands out of my purse, I can stop him from digging so deep.”
That was when I told her that my job was cutting back. Ten thousand people were getting the short end of the stick. Another restructure move. Right in my face, six hardworking men that had been with Boeing for the last ten years had been laid off in the last two days. Last in, first out. I was three people from getting shoved out the door, so I needed to lay low. That was part of the stress that I had been trying to run off.
She asked, “What are your plans?”
“I e-mailed an app to Dan L. Steel.”
“I’m showing houses to a guy who works there. Give me a résumé and I’ll give it to him for you.”
I kissed the side of her face, her ears. She wiggled closer.
Teamwork. This was gonna take a lot of teamwork.
We didn’t say anything for a while. I was remembering the pain from when Dana had called me a coward. I’d never forget that look in her eyes when she cut my dignity down to the bone. It was ironic. Not being a coward on a cold, stormy night was what had gotten me where I was today.
“Vince?”
I said, “Yeah.”
“Since we’re laying it all on the table, I want to make sure I say this, and I want to say it the right way. I don’t have anything against you sending your kid money, but I don’t think you should mail money if they won’t let you see her. If she is your daughter, they could at least call you and let you talk to her.”
Her honesty burned like fire. I guess that’s the way truth is, the uncomfortable way the truth always feels.
She went on, “We have to set our goals. Let’s get everything ready for the wedding first, save for that.”
“What kinda wedding you want?”
“Nothing in Vegas, I know that much. I want something blessed, not damned. I want what I deserve.”
“What we can afford or what you deserve?”
“What I deserve.”
I didn’t say anything.
She said, “After we’re situated, if she hasn’t called, put that C.S. money aside, open up a special account and let it draw some interest. I think we should do that until you get that straightened out with Malaika.”
I patted her leg. Didn’t agree or disagree. Vocabulary was on lock-down. Defensiveness came alive, made me question if she was going to try and control that aspect of my life. Until she said that, I hadn’t realized how personal that part of my life was for me. I had wanted to keep one separate from the other.
She went on with what sounded like my conditions of surrender. “You are gonna eighty-six that bed of yours, right?”
“I just told you my job was cutting back, so with an ax swinging at my head, it would be stupid of me to go out and buy new furniture right now.”
I hoped my words didn’t come off too harsh, echo too much of my frustration.
“Then what I said about making a plan and putting that C.S. money in the bank till you hear from them should really make sense, right?”
Again, I patted her leg.
She rocked awhile, but didn’t say anything.
Her issues had arisen. I wondered what else she hadn’t told me.
From my back porch, part of the HOLLYWOOD sign was visible in the rolls of the mountains that stood behind the Griffith Park observatory. A few drops of rain came down. Cool water that soothed my warm skin.
Dana sat between my legs, leaned back, moved her braids in a sweeping motion, held her face back and let heaven’s water dampen her skin. Raindrops raced from her face down into the crevices of her breasts. She arched her back, made her bosom stand out. She had on one of my plain white V-cut T-shirts. A very thin T-shirt. No bra. Her dark nipples were alive, pushing their way out of that cotton. I rubbed my fingers over her skin, around her nipples, watched them grow, felt how erect they were.
Dana licked my hand, took in two fingers as they passed her lips, sucked them deep. Rain steamed off my skin like a bowl of hot soup. My free hand traced around her neck, to her breasts, did that over and over.
She stopped long enough to say, “That really makes you hard.”
“You noticed.”
“You’re about to poke a hole in my back.”
Police sirens screamed like Richard Pryor on fire. Big motors revved; LAPD was chasing some fools through the neighborhood. Bouncing over dips, screeching, and swerving. When the noise level dropped, voices came from the other upstairs apartment. Soft-hearted talking changed into the sound of two beautiful women laughing.
Dana purred out a sound that sent a chill up my spine.
She took my middle finger again, slowly licked it from fingertip to my palm, sucked it over and over. “This morning I got in the shower and pretended the hot water was your hands touching me everywhere. And I made love to myself, but it was with you at the same time.”
She pulled my back firm against her crotch. Rubbed against me. Made small circles. She licked my ear and whispered, “Feel my fire?”
“I feel the heat.”
“Wanna?”
“Again?”
She whispered, “Yeah.”
My tone tendered, “I wanna if you wanna.”
“With you I always wanna. That’s part of the problem.”
Both of us heard the clatter at the same time. Somebody dropped a piece of silverware. The jangle came from the back door of the apartment behind us.
“Juanita’s eavesdropping.” That was me whispering.
“Let her listen. She might learn something.”
“Stop it. She might hear you.”
Their back door creaked opened. Naiomi bumped her way out, a blue plastic laundry basket filled with white clothes on her narrow hips. She’d put on tight Levi’s and a baggy gray sweatshirt, one from the post office that had Malcolm X’s picture on the front. She hurried down their side of the stairway, moved like she wanted to get to the laundry room before anyone else did. When she made it to the bottom, she paused her stride, looked up, and smirked. She saw my hard-on, I know she did.
Naiomi turned the corner facing the alleyway and the row of garages. Another noise came from their apartment. Juanita was in the kitchen window, cordless phone in hand, dialing. She nodded, closed the blinds. Her voice was still there, talking very low in Spanish, her voice soft and rushed.
“Mami—ella se fu a la lavanderia . . . puedo hablar por un minuto . . . cuando te puedo ver?”
Her voice faded, like she was walking away.
Dana rubbed between my legs, whispered, “I wanna strip for you.”
“Strip?”
“Yeah. Like they do at the strip clubs.”
I hummed out a good feeling.
She kissed me. “I wanna tie you up, put on a Janet Jackson CD, and do my sexy table dance for you. Think you might like something like that?”
While candles burned, Dana danced slow and easy, ethereal, defying gravity. Took off one piece at a time, did that for a long while. Sat me in a kitchen chair and did all kinds of flexible things with her body, moved with the smoothness of a contortionist, tied my wrists with satin scarfs, did all kinds of erotic things to me, put her mouth in places that had never met pleasure. She was smiling, but she was serious. Got into it like I never thought she could.
Another side of her I’d never seen.
I called Malaika’s mother ten times. The number, disconnected. I mailed another check and put a note in asking them to call. The check didn’t come back. It didn’t get cashed either. No phone call.
Dana moved in before two weeks had gone by. Put most of her boxes in my garage. Then she was gone, off selling property to people with decent credit and higher incomes. Opportunity was there so I glanced through some of her stuff, the boxes that hadn’t been taped down. Wanted to get to know who she really was, find out things she hadn’t told me. Found photos of her and her dad at Disney World, hugging and smiling. Cards from Claudio, but no pictures. Notes that spoke of long nights with her in his arms.
I looked through her stuff because she never talked about going back, never offered to give me a tour of her old life, never wanted me to meet her old friends. I’d driven her all over L.A., showed her everything from elementary school to my old colleges, the house I grew up in on Chanera.
She was still a mystery, a mystery with no real history.
I let that go. She was in L.A. I let go of whatever she left behind.
The arrangement worked pretty well. She cooked. When it was too hot to turn the oven on, I grilled on the back porch. She was pretty neat but not anal. She didn’t clean up after me. If I left a shirt in the living room, she’d say “Your shirt’s in the living room.” She’d say that in a soft tone, like I was looking for the shirt and couldn’t find it. I woke to the soft beeps of her alarm clock. Sometimes she played that old Desiree song first thing in the morning, “Gotta be tough, gotta be stronger . . .” Either that or that 1980-something flaming disco tune some woman sang about being a “native New Yorker.” Sings and dances and struts and showers to those messages while she made herself wake up.
She bought a few things at Target, pretty much redecorated the whole place. Beige curtains replaced my darker ones. Plants were in every room. Her pictures depicting New York were put up with mine. Her mother’s pictures went up with my parents’ photos. The apartment had a new kind of flavor. A family flavor. Fresh, colorful towels in the bathroom. Perfumes and incense. That made the john the nicest room in the house. Her library of books were added to mine.
Ain’t nothing like a woman’s touch.
But I still had that same bed. We made love in the shower, living room, hallway, in the kitchen, marked our territory from corner to corner, but rapture was never comfortable when we were on that old bed.
Every day Dana asked me a hundred questions about Malaika, something that left me feeling uneasy, then kept asking about putting Kwanzaa’s pictures on display. I stopped by Robinson’s-May and picked up a four-section golden frame for my child’s pictures, fell into a sentimental mood and spent over thirty dollars, then put that image on the same worn dresser I had Dana’s picture on. I arranged all of them so they were the last thing I saw before I went to sleep, the first thing I saw when I woke up.
Days after that, I went to the Jewelry Mart in downtown L.A. Spent all day shopping for rings. Found a nice rock for two thousand. That was a big piece of my savings, but it was a good investment.
First I took Dana to the Ahmanson Theater to see
Rent
, a musical about struggling artists in New York’s Greenwich Village.
As soon as the curtain came down, I whizzed Dana south to Orange County’s Laguna Beach for a weekend getaway in a suite at the Hilton. I dropped down on one knee, told her I didn’t want her cohopulating, asked her if she would be my wife, even though she wanted a man with a different résumé, with lighter baggage and less of a past.
She accepted.
11
Dana
Intense voices came through the wall from next door.
Warm water ran down my back. I said, “They’re cat-fighting.”
Vince and I were soaping each other down, acting like Adam and Eve, the smell of a slow burning incense and perfumes making this humid room our Garden of Eden. My back was against Vince’s chest, his arms around me. Heaven has gotta be like this. We’d been taking a long, lazy shower, standing under the water and lollygagging about nothing.