by Pearl Cleage
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I think he’s local.”
I wondered what it was like to go through life oblivious to your surroundings and devoid of curiosity about them. That ought to be a reality show: Oblivious and Devoid.
Ms. Booker was neither. She was totally focused in the way of those people who manage the lives and, more important, the schedules of busy people who sign their checks.
“Ms. Evans,” she said, entering the lobby and immediately extending her hand. She was very tall and compensated by wearing flat shoes with her well-cut pantsuit, which was exactly the same color as the couch. I wondered if she would disappear if she sat down on it. “I’m Clarissa Booker, Ms. Woodruff’s assistant.”
“Josephine Evans,” I said.
She sat down beside me, and while she didn’t disappear, the effect was still strange, as if at any moment the sofa might swallow her up whole.
“Ms. Woodruff was hoping to be here when you came by,” she said, looking concerned. She was holding a small brown envelope with both hands like I might try to snatch it and make a run for the elevator. The address of the duplex was clearly written on the outside.
“No problem,” I said. “I just need the key.”
“Well, she was hoping that you might talk with her before you go over there.”
The way she said “over there” made it sound like I was planning an ill-advised trip to a war zone.
“Is it occupied?”
“No, it’s still empty,” she said.
“Is there a problem?”
Over Ms. Booker’s well-tailored shoulder, the receptionist was watching us without even bothering to pretend she had other tasks to occupy her time. What the hell was going on?
“No problem,” Ms. Booker said. “It’s just that the place has been unoccupied for a while and there’s been some vandalism.”
Now she was starting to worry me. “What kind of vandalism?”
She looked pained. “I’m not sure of the specific damage. It’s just that when these buildings stand empty, they attract transients.”
“How long has it been empty?”
“Seven or eight months. Maybe a year.”
That’s when they stopped sending checks to Jasmine. This was not looking good, but I was confused. “Why hasn’t it been rented?”
“It’s hard to keep tenants over there.”
Over there. Again with the war zone.
“It was already empty when we agreed to take it on as part of the settlement.”
“The settlement?” Maybe this echoing thing was contagious. Now I was doing it. “What settlement?”
“I’m really not comfortable having this conversation with you,” Ms. Booker said, clutching the small envelope even tighter. “Why don’t we do this? I’ll get Ms. Woodruff’s book and we’ll find a time for the two of us to have lunch and she can—”
“Is that the key?” I said, interrupting her.
She couldn’t deny it. “Yes, but—”
“Then why don’t we do this,” I said, “you give me my key, I’ll go take a look at my house, and then I’ll be better prepared to talk with Ms. Woodruff.”
If she could have figured out a way to swallow that key, envelope and all, I think she would have.
I held out my hand. “Over lunch.”
She handed the envelope to me and I stood up. She did too, reluctantly unfolding her long gray self off the couch.
“Thank you,” I said. “Shall I call you this afternoon to make the appointment?”
“I’m not sure when she’ll be in,” Ms. Booker said, wishing, I’m sure, that I’d just go away.
I smiled. “But you’ll be here, right?”
She nodded reluctantly. “Right.”
“Good.”
She waited until I reached for the silver handle on that big glass door. “Ms. Evans?”
“Yes?”
“You should make some noise before you go inside,” she said. “If there are transients, it’s not a good idea to surprise them.”
FIFTEEN
As I got closer to my house, nothing looked or felt like it did in West End. From the litter-strewn parking lot outside the grocery store, to the overflowing trash can in front of the gas station, on past the hard-eyed young men in their oversize pants who seemed to be gathered on every corner, this was clearly a neighborhood in distress. A boarded-up house on one corner had been spray painted by desperate neighbors. Crackhouse, the big red letters proclaimed. They sell dope in here! While I waited at the light, I saw a young man with an unkempt Afro and wearing droopy jeans head around to the back of the place. Obviously, he saw the sign as an advertisement instead of a warning.
I had just passed the Lincoln Cemetery on my left, which meant the house was coming up on my right. The grass and weeds were so high in the front yard that I almost missed the entrance to the long, crooked driveway. One of the unique features of the house had always been the fact that it sat up on the only hill for miles. That’s what provided the slope of its expansive green lawn in the front yard and made up for the constant roar of the freeway, whose construction had eaten up most of the back. The house faced Martin Luther King and took up the entire corner lot. A stand of scraggly-looking dogwood trees lined up on one side of the property, separating it from its closest neighbor, an unsavory-looking soul food restaurant at the bottom of the hill, but in no way obstructing the view of the small residential street that ran behind the lot and down toward the freeway.
I pulled up in the yard and looked around. An overgrown lawn was the least of it. There was trash everywhere. All the windows were cracked or broken or covered by plywood and what looked like cardboard. The porch screens were ripped and torn. There was lots of graffiti and what looked to me like it could have been a splatter of dried blood on one of the outside walls. It didn’t even look like the same place. All the loving care my mother had put into this house all the years we lived there had been wiped out by the force of sustained neglect, and a despair greater than her optimism could ever have anticipated.
I couldn’t begin to imagine what I’d find inside, but I had to know. I clicked the locks and got ready to step out of the car when I remembered Ms. Booker’s warning about not surprising uninvited guests. Sound advice, I was sure, but what were my options? Ring the bell? Call ahead? Neither one of those made any sense, of course, but what the hell was I supposed to do now? Sneak up to the window and peek in to see what I could see? Walk in unannounced and assert my rights as the landlord to whoever I might find camped out in my mother’s living room? Call the police and ask for an escort? I could only imagine how that conversation would go: Excuse me, is this 911? I’m scared to go inside my house because there might be some bad guys in there. Can you come over and check it out?
I felt helpless and angry. Angry at Ms. Woodruff for not handling her business and at myself for not handling mine. The longer I sat, the madder I got. This place was a problem, not a solution. Down below on the freeway, or maybe from the traffic speeding by on Martin Luther King, I heard a horn and then one in response and then another. Now that made sense. A loud, indignant noise to announce to anybody within earshot that you were mad as hell and you weren’t going to take it anymore. I joined the angry chorus, laying on Zora’s horn to protest the mess I saw in front of me. I don’t deserve this and why did I come here anyway and what kind of grandmother would promise this as a legacy and who was bleeding on the walls of my house and where are they now and where am I now, and where is home anyway and how far is too far and what good is a safe house if it’s scarier than whatever it is you’re running from?
When the back door opened, I jumped about a foot in the air and jerked my hand off the horn. The man who stepped out didn’t look too scary, but I was shaking anyway. Who was he and what was he doing there? I popped down the power-door locks with an audible click and watched him through the windshield. He looked to be about forty, but it was hard to tell. He had on a pair of jeans and a brown jacket, bo
th of which had seen better days. His hair was longer than it needed to be and his beard was patchy and turning gray. His ancient high-top tennis shoes looked like he had plucked them from a throwaway pile to get whatever wear he could pretend was left in them. His eyes looked weary but not desperate.
We just looked at each other, neither one of us knowing what to do next.
Finally, I opened the door and stepped out of the car without turning off the ignition. I kept the door between us.
“What are you doing here?” I said.
“Nothing,” he said. “Just keeping an eye on the place.”
“Keeping an eye on the place for who?”
He looked at me and his eyes narrowed slightly. “Nobody.”
“Who else is in there?”
“Nobody.”
“Who are you?”
“Who are you?”
“I own this place.”
He looked surprised. “You do?”
“Yes, I do.” My voice sounded a lot more confident than I felt.
“Well, where have you been?”
Now it was my turn to be surprised. Of all the things I had expected, righteous indignation was not one of them. “What?”
“Look at it! How could you just let it go like this?”
This was becoming more surreal by the second. Now the homeless squatter was going to reprimand me for being an absentee landlord? What next? A citizen’s arrest?
“I don’t see how that’s any of your business,” I said. “How long have you been here?”
“Couple months,” he said. “Give or take.”
“Anybody from the management company ever come by to check on the place?”
He frowned again. “What do you think?”
His tone ticked me off a little. “Well, if you were going to camp out here, why didn’t you at least clean it up a little?”
“Why didn’t you?”
It was clear this conversation was over. The person I needed to talk to was sitting behind a big glass door over on Cascade Road. Ms. Greer Woodruff and Associates had some big-time explaining to do.
SIXTEEN
I’ll wait,” I said to the babbling beauty at the front desk who was trying to tell me that Ms. Woodruff and Ms. Booker were both in a meeting and couldn’t be disturbed.
“It’s going to be a long meeting,” she said, clearly not looking forward to the prospect of spending several hours trapped in a room with a madwoman who had blown in like an ill-tempered wind and already raised her voice well above the level of acceptable office decorum.
I didn’t give a damn about decorum. I was two minutes away from kicking open that closed door without waiting to be buzzed in and carrying my loud, indignant ass into the inner sanctum to demand some answers to my increasingly indignant set of questions. I took a seat on the gray sofa again and tried to calm down. The receptionist pursed her lips and turned back to her keyboard. She didn’t have much choice. She couldn’t very well throw me out. I figured I could take her if it came down to it, but she didn’t look like a woman to whom public tussling presented itself as an option. She was more likely to figure I’d get tired of waiting and leave on my own.
She could not have been more wrong. I had no place to go and no time to get there. I had trusted Greer Woodruff and Associates to look out for my property in exchange for fees for their services. In return, they had allowed my mother’s parting gift to become not only an eyesore, but a haven for neighborhood predators and thieves. They had effectively cut off my only current source of reliable income, not to mention Zora’s only real possibility of an inheritance. I wasn’t going anywhere until somebody explained to me what was going on.
I picked up Atlanta magazine to distract myself and flipped it open right to a big story on Atlanta’s growing community of women entrepreneurs. The first profile was of one Greer Woodruff, who the magazine called “a successful Atlanta businesswoman who combines active respect for tradition with a bold vision for the future.” You couldn’t prove it by me. Her background was impressive. Howard University undergrad, Harvard MBA, public and private sector experience at the highest level, and now president of her own urban redevelopment firm.
In the photograph the magazine ran beside her profile, she was leaning back against her desk with her arms crossed and a pleasant but serious look on her face. She was about my age, broad shouldered, beautifully made up, and dressed for success in a dark blue suit with a skirt, not pants, and a pair of plain black pumps. Her salt-and-pepper gray hair was brushed back from her face in soft waves intended to deflect your attention from the almost masculine cut of her strong jaw-line.
I tossed down the magazine wondering how long I really was prepared to wait without going off, when the inner sanctum door opened and Greer Woodruff strode into the waiting room, followed by four men and Ms. Booker, who was scribbling busily on a clipboard. Two of the men were wearing very expensive suits that were just a little too flashy for business, as were the too-big-to-be-real, too-big-not-to-be diamond studs the tallest one wore in his ears. Both of them were black and had their hair neatly trimmed and edged up so sharply they must have come here straight from the barbershop. The stark white of their very expensive shirts was even brighter next to their dark skin. One of the other black men was dressed in a BET version of hip-hop chic complete with pants riding so low that the crotch was almost at his knees and a golden dental grille that made his smile a study in conspicuous consumption.
The fourth man was a slender white man wearing a much more conservative and considerably cheaper suit and a grin that can only be described as shit eating. The others were laughing, but the best he could manage was an uncomfortable smile.
“So I told him he should make other arrangements,” the hip-hop fashionista was saying. “Or I’d see him on Election Day. Am I lyin’?”
He turned to the white man whose grin didn’t waver. “I’m sure the councilman heard you loud and clear,” he said. “Loud and clear.”
“Damn right.”
“I couldn’t have said it better myself, Jimmy,” Greer Woodruff said, touching the hip-hop guy’s elbow lightly as if she was steering him out of her office.
That remark elicited another round of laughter and then her eyes fell on me. There didn’t seem to be any flicker of recognition, but her radar picked up the presence of a possible problem and set off a distant warning bell.
“Politics is easy,” Jimmy said, trying to extend his moment at the center of attention. “It’s the politicians that are a pain in the ass.”
Greer Woodruff flickered a look at Ms. Booker, who was surprised and not pleased to see me sitting almost exactly where she had left me a few hours ago. She broke away from the small group and headed for me immediately.
“Gentlemen,” Ms. Woodruff said, herding them toward the door and out to the elevator. “Keep me in the loop as you move ahead.”
“Ms. Evans,” Ms. Booker said, her voice quiet and firm. “I thought I asked you to call for an appointment.”
“I’m here to see Ms. Woodruff,” I said loudly. “I don’t need an appointment.”
The group at the door turned as one in the direction of my outraged assertion and Ms. Woodruff frowned and took a step in my direction.
“I’m Greer….”
But before she could finish, the white guy in the group stepped around her, his eyes wide with surprise and delight. “Oh, my God! Are you Josephine Evans?”
Nobody ever recognized me in Atlanta. I was as surprised as he was. “Yes.”
“Oh, my God!” he said again while the others looked at him for some explanation of how he happened to know the angry black woman waiting for Greer. “I’m Duncan Matthews. I saw you in Medea. Five years ago in Amsterdam. My partner and I were there for two weeks and I saw the show four times. Twice in a seat and twice standing room. Every show was sold out!”
“That was a good production,” I said, enjoying his enthusiasm in spite of myself.
“Good? It was a
mazing! I’ve never forgotten one second of it. You were magnificent! Absolutely magnificent!”
Greer Woodruff was running through her mental Rolodex and coming up empty. She tapped the man on his back gently. “Duncan? Aren’t you going to introduce us to your friend?”
“Friend? Oh, no! I’m not a friend. I’m a fan! A total fan!” He grinned at me and made a small bow. “Greer Woodruff, Jim Nguchi, Matt Lovejoy, Tyrone Parker, I would like to present Ms. Josephine Evans, the most amazing actress in the world.”
“Thank you,” I said. “You’re very kind.”
“It’s an honor,” he said. “That scene at the end where you come out with the blood all over your dress, carrying your dead son? It still gives me chills to think about it. What are you doing here? Are you performing anywhere? Please say somebody is remounting that Medea. I’ll buy my tickets today!”
The three brothers exchanged looks to see if this was making sense to anybody but the white boy. It wasn’t, so they checked their expensive watches as if on cue. Their work here was done. It was time to go.
I smiled at the guy’s enthusiasm. “I’m sorry, but there are no immediate plans for that. I’m here on other business.”
Greer turned to Ms. Booker, hovering nearby. “Clarissa, will you make sure these gentlemen find their way to the elevator while I take care of our guest?”
“Of course,” Clarissa said, guiding them out the door as the elevator bell announced its arrival.
Greer turned to Duncan. “You’d better ride down with them, don’t you think? In case there are any loose ends.”
His disappointment was all over his face, but she was clearly calling the shots.
He smiled at me once more, reached into his pocket, and handed me a business card. It said, Duncan Matthews Properties. “If there’s ever anything I can do, please don’t hesitate to call on me.”
“Thank you,” I said, slipping the card in my pocket.
“No,” he said, putting his hand over his heart and bowing. “Thank you.”
“Mr. Matthews?” Clarissa said, holding the elevator door with one hand.
