Blues Dancing

by Diane McKinney-Whetstone

  But suddenly Sage looked up from the card tricks the church girls were doing, prompted by a new hue that was coloring the air in the room. And she saw Verdi and she jumped up and barreled right for Verdi, squealing as she went, and that started a parade of children squealing and running to greet Verdi too. And then Johnson looked for the source of the commotion as he walked down the stairs, and he had a clear view to what was happening by the door, to who had just come in from the enclosed porch. And he hadn’t felt so flush, so dizzy, so light-headed since his get-high days as he did right now looking down the stairs at Verdi, his Verdi, and he wanted to laugh and cry at the same time because she was so beautiful, so sweetly poised as the children gathered around her and pulled at her arms and bags and she laughed and said, “Wait, wait, let me get out of my jacket, I have enough surprises for everybody, be patient, children, please.” And she looked around to see who could help peel some of the children away and Johnson stepped back up the stairs, one, two, almost to the top of the stairs from where he could look down on Verdi without her seeing him, he didn’t want her to see him, not right now, not until he could tell his hands to be still because they were shaking now, because they just wanted to grab onto Verdi, just grab her and hold her and never let her go.

  And the overly exuberant children half pulled, half pushed Verdi toward the dining room and she almost stumbled over the one or two in front of her as they clumsily made it to the buffet where the gifts were stacked. Except for Sage who hung back to look up at Johnson standing near the top of the stairs, so mesmerized was she by the way the color blue splashed all around him, turning itself inside out in huge waves that looked so beautiful to her.

  And Kitt moved like lightning trying to get to Verdi as she stood in the dining room, trying to warn her that Johnson was here, my God, how could she have done this, she asked herself, how could she have maneuvered this situation so that these former lovers would meet unaware like this after twenty years?

  But right now Verdi was being helped out of her jacket by her students’ mothers who rarely got the opportunity to be out with their children’s principal in a social setting. And they were taking full advantage as one folded Verdi’s coat over her arm, and another relieved her of her bag, and another pulled up a chair and told her to sit as they went right into questions about their child’s progress, and was such and such a teacher going to retire, and what about that unqualified aide who ran the extended day? And Verdi was eager to oblige since this was her first year in this position and she was still in prove-herself mode. And Kitt tried not to be rude as she said, “Oh, can y’all excuse me and my cousin for two minutes, please?”

  And she pulled Verdi up out of the chair, away from her clingy audience, and Verdi kissed Kitt on the cheek, said, “Hey, cuz, you misled me big time, I didn’t know you were throwing a birthday party for Sage and a cabaret for yourself.”

  “Did you see him?” is all Kitt said, breathless, perspiration forming as a glaze along her forehead and her cheeks.

  “See who?” Verdi asked, feeling so light inside just being here with her cousin and her aunt and Sage and the other little ones from her school, even their parents. She was feeling so unburdened, so unfettered having escaped earlier from the shroud of Rowe’s affection that had been too opaque, too tight and constricting for her today.

  “Who, Kitty Kat?” she asked again. “Did I see who?”

  They were standing under the molded archway between the living room and the dining room right next to the heavy cast-iron pole lamp with the cut-glass Tiffany-style shade. And at first Verdi thought it was the diffusion of light that made Kitt’s face appear so scattered, as if she were midway between an apology and a moanful expression of pain but with a soft wiftiness about it that was so unlike Kitt. “What’s wrong with you, Kitt?” she asked her again.

  “I—I guess you didn’t see—”

  “Who? Who? Who?” Verdi asked, getting irritated, getting ready to look around for her auntie so she could explain what Kitt was talking about, or look around to see who the cause of Kitt’s stupor was. And just as she was about to turn exasperated and scan the room, she heard the voice: “Me.” That’s all he said, but just the touch of that mono-syllable against her ear and she more than heard it, she felt it as a jolt that went straight to heart and then as a burst of flames like spontaneous combustion that seems to happen out of nowhere, but only happens really because the elements are in place, ready: some kindling, oxidation, stillness over time, and someone opens a door and air rushes in and a massive fire lives again.

  “Me, Verdi. She’s talking about me, Verdi, baby, it’s Johnson, it’s me.”

  Eight

  There was space between them. This pair of lovers who’d not gazed on each other for two decades. Kitt backed away and threw up her hands conceding defeat or wanting to shout hallelujah, she wasn’t sure which. The Hawkins twins’ father had something soft and clear blaring through the stereo, Louis Armstrong singing “You Go to My Head.” And all around these two was the laughter and frivolity of the two parties merging at the archway between the living and dining rooms. The children darted in and out in neat circumferences and edged Johnson and Verdi closer in. But they were too conscious of the space between them, the years, the searing passion that had turned on them. It was as if the space had its own form accumulating itself now from a heap on the floor, taking on color. Blue: not Sage’s blue that danced and showed itself in all its variations. But a still sad blue as if symbolizing all the abbreviated trumpet notes that had sagged and then fallen at their feet.

  Though they stood right next to the cast-iron pole lamp and the light filtered through the Tiffany-style shade and rained all over them, it felt dark in here under this crowded archway as Verdi and Johnson watched the space between them reverberating like a broken heart.

  Until Johnson looked up. Thinking it silly to stand here in front of the only woman he really ever loved and stare at the floor like a pubescent boy at his first school dance, he looked up. And there was that face that had enchanted him all those years ago, that he’d dream about even now in dreams that were so real he’d wake swearing he’d just touched the mole on her cheek. The same doe eyes with that downward slant, the same brown-over-gold skin color, the same roundness to the cheeks, fleshiness to the lips, politeness to the nose. Her hair was cut short though, straightened and tapered at the sides. He didn’t know why that surprised him, surely he couldn’t have expected to see her still sporting that overgrown Afro he’d nudged her into wearing. What did surprise him was that she was so slim, thin actually, far too thin for a woman nearing forty and purporting contentment. She should have a roundness to the hips like Kitt, he thought, like Posie, like she had the day he met her. Surely it was in her genes. He felt himself growing agitated at Rowe, holding him responsible for her uncharacteristic smallness, damning him, damning himself too. But then Verdi looked up and the agitation dissipated. Just having the feel of her eyes on him after all these years and everything that wasn’t good and honest and pure dissipated. He thought he could even forgive Rowe if it meant he could hold on to the feel of her eyes. And then he couldn’t even meet her gaze anymore and was back looking at the blue space on the floor.

  Verdi too. She looked up just long enough to glimpse his face, lean and brown, and though also absent the overgrown Afro, remarkably unchanged. Even the asymmetrical arch to his eyebrows that made him look as if he were always on the verge of a question, the slight hump to the bridge of his nose that used to make her giggle when she’d slide her finger from his eyes to his lips, his lips still thin and dark and soft looking. But he had a broadness about him now. Maybe it was the cable-knit sweater, but his chest looked so sturdy, so indestructible. And now she had to look away too, or risk being rushed with a cacophony of feeling that would have her swooning, her equilibrium so shot completely to hell as it was, have her running her hand along the broadness of his chest to find the spot where her head should go.

  They both lo
oked down and watched the space between them that did appear to be moving now and rising up from the floor like a smoky-blue cloud and then separating into two distinct forms that teased and gyrated and danced to the beat of Louis Armstrong’s trumpet now. Their blues. Banishing their destructive past for this evening in the archway between Kitt’s rooms that was brightly lit but felt sultry and smoky and dim to Johnson and Verdi as they watched their blues dancing like they wished that they could, until Johnson stretched his fingertips through the movable space between them, the years. And they touched fingers and then entire hands, palm against palm, and now they were dancing too.

  Nine

  Kitt and Posie communicated across the dining-room table as they helped the children get settled into chairs, and tied napkins under their chins, and spooned up their plates. Kitt’s loosened facial muscles said that she was so relieved that Verdi hadn’t devastated Johnson by storming out after all; the confident tilt of Posie’s head said see I told you, true love always, always wins. And now everyone crowded into the dining room as mothers and fathers and neighbors piled their plates high with food, and the children made instruments and weapons of their plastic utensils, and parents started to yell, stop that, put that down, and Verdi came into the dining room and lightened it a hundred watts she was glowing so. She did her special clap and wave that the children from her school understood and that always settled them down, and at least Posie and Kitt were able to get pizza squares onto their plates. And now the party switched places as the children claimed the dining room, and the adults, grateful for the supervision if they had children here, and for the opportunity to pair off with a member of the opposite sex if they were here unattached, slipped unobtrusively into the living room.

  Johnson still stood in the archway, leaning against the molded post, allowing it to prop him up because the whole substance of him had gone to mush. His palms were burning from where they’d just touched Verdi’s palms, their lifelines facing, the bend in his fingers aching to curl around hers. He wanted to look down at his hands to see if they looked different, to see if they were red and flush or even on fire hot as they were. But he wanted more to look at Verdi as she walked around the dining-room table helping one child with her napkin, another break his pizza square in half. As long as he could see her he’d know for sure she wasn’t some cruelly satisfying mirage. She kissed a red-faced boy on his cheek and right now he wanted to be that child, wanted to know again her lips against his face. He felt himself sinking as he watched her walk into the kitchen behind Posie because he didn’t want to lose sight of her because if he lost sight of her he might have to wait twenty more years before their palms could touch again. He felt as if he wanted to cry even as he told himself that he was being ridiculous, acting like a little boy or worse a lunatic.

  He straightened himself up and took up his weight again. He couldn’t allow himself to just splatter like this in Kitt’s house. He cleared his throat, began to search for someone he could laugh with from among the adults in the living room. Thought that he should get a plate of food first, put his hands to some good use, try to act casually, try not to let it show that he was on a launching pad headed for some heretofore uncharted emotional territories, spinning, weightless, and so filled up.

  He was self-conscious as he crossed over into the dining room, the clickety-clack of the children’s indistinguishable chatter mimicking his own inexpressible internal clatter as he walked to the buffet where Kitt was oozing melting lime sherbet from its carton into a punch bowl filled with 7UP and ice. She nudged him, poked her elbow into his side as she stirred the punch. “How you doing?” she asked.

  How was he doing? he thought to himself. How did she think he was doing? There were no words to describe how he was doing. She might as well have asked Sage to explain to her how he was doing. He hunched his shoulders as he picked up a plate from the buffet, a napkin wrapped around a fork and a knife. “I’m—I’m, you know, I don’t know,” is all he said.

  Kitt had her face tilted in a question mark, her mouth fixed to say something else, maybe apologize to him for manipulating circumstances so that he’d find himself shocked like this, shaken. She could see how shaken he was. But right then Sage began banging her fists on the table, then she pushed herself back from the table and jumped down, bounded across the room headed for the front door.

  “Somebody must be coming,” Kitt said as she handed the empty sherbet carton to Posie who’d just peeped her head in to see how the serving platters were holding up. “Can’t imagine who it is, since everybody who’s supposed to be here is already here.”

  Then Sage started spinning around and stomping her feet and pointing her fist toward the door.

  “Obviously a stranger or she wouldn’t be so agitated,” Kitt said, concern splashing her forehead as she followed Sage into the other room and that started the parade of Sage’s party mates as they all headed toward the front door. The children hampered Johnson from falling in line right behind Kitt though he tried to, had always had a peeve about a woman answering the door after dark if a man was in the house, probably from having felt the need to protect his mother after his father left.

  Verdi walked in from the kitchen then with a pitcher filled with springwater floating lemon circles along the top. She edged past Johnson to get to the buffet to set the pitcher down and when she did allowed the entirety of her person to press against him. And surely he would have been otherwise so affected in this now empty dining room where her womanhood had meshed into its rightful place against him that he would have just grabbed her and taken her lips against his. But his street senses were too alerted by what was going on in the living room; whoever was at the front door had caused Kitt to react with a jolt that Johnson could see all the way from where he stood. And now it bothered him that they were taking too long to either come in or leave, and Kitt’s tussles of locked hair pushing up from her yellow-and-green headband seemed hysterical as they flew from one direction to the other as Kitt moved her head from side to side talking to whoever it was.

  Instinctively he counted the men in the room, told himself to settle down, as he reminded himself that there were at least three cops in there. “Yo, somebody get Kitt’s back,” he yelled in, and the men immediately pulled their attention away from their plates and their hounding ways and now from Sage who seemed to be in the middle of a convulsion she was jumping and spinning so out of control that it enticed some of her playmates to do the same. Verdi ran in the living room then to get to the children before they collided and hurt themselves, and the half-a-dozen men in the room had circled Kitt at the door, providing an impenetrable barrier should there be a need to block someone’s entry into the living room, and something told Johnson to just stand where he was, to not join the others in the living room, and then he knew why as the barrier of men parted, and through this aperture in walked Rowe, right through the door on into Kitt’s house.

  Rowe. That goddamned motherfucking Rowe. How many years had he spent boiling over the thought of that pompous, conniving, lustful, old, old, motherfucking Rowe with his Verdi? His. And how many more times did the ambivalence of having to admit that Rowe had saved Verdi’s life when he himself couldn’t, when he himself had been responsible for her descent, when having to ingest that thought that he handed Verdi over to Rowe threatened to sever once and for all the tenuous grip he had on what was left of his reality, threatened to leave him a babbling imbecile just walking the streets dehumanized to be laughed at or pitied for the rest of his life?

  He didn’t even think about what to do as he watched Rowe go straight to Verdi who was on the floor now with Sage, rocking her, calming her down. And even though he felt the coals of a vengeful fire reignite in the pit of his stomach as Rowe leaned down and kissed Verdi on the cheek, he knew that sometimes the real strength of a man was exhibited in his ability to just walk away, the way he’d had to just walk away from Verdi twenty-some years ago when to stay in place would have meant the death of them both. H
e walked away now so that he wouldn’t complicate Verdi’s life tonight, so that Rowe wouldn’t look up and see him standing there and assume that they’d planned some luscious rendezvous, especially since Verdi was so innocent, they both were tonight. So he walked away from the buffet in the dining room, right on through the kitchen, right past Posie who was running water in the sink, right into Kitt’s therapy room, where he didn’t even turn on the light, where he just stood and leaned against the mauve-colored wall and allowed the vanilla hanging in the air to calm him down.

  Verdi didn’t stay long after that. She left before they opened the gifts, sang “Happy Birthday,” cut the cake. Rowe’s unexpected presence in Kitt’s Sansom Street row house caused a disharmony in the air. Though he came in smiling, congenial, extending his hand to the men who’d been prepared to take him down on the first sign from Kitt, Sage’s agitation didn’t really dissipate, and the other children never completely resettled back into their dining-room spaces, which pulled the parents and neighbors from their free-forming flow in the living room. Plus Kitt’s disconcertedness was all too showy. She started dropping things, losing her train of activity, she couldn’t even remember names when she proceeded to introduce Rowe around.