Blues Dancing

by Diane McKinney-Whetstone

  Never let on that he knew, how he knew, never let on that it was Johnson who tipped him off. Had to be Johnson, no one else but Johnson. My God, she thought as the memory went completely to water and tumbled down her face and she covered her face with hands. Why else would Johnson have told her to meet him at College Hall. “If you want the bag, you got to meet me, Verdi Mae,” he’d said through the phone right into her ear.

  “I can’t get there,” she’d protested. “I’m sick, Johnson, baby, please don’t make me come out, please baby I gave you my last money, please come to me, baby, we can get high, we can get down, baby, bring it on to me.”

  He hadn’t budged; she’d never known a time when her begging him hadn’t made him budge; she could budge him off of everything; make him do anything when she begged.

  “You got to go through to get to it,” he said in her ear. “This time, baby, you got to come to me.”

  She covered her face completely with her hands now and her breaths against her face were moist and shallow and shocked. Johnson had drawn her out that night with no intention of getting her high. Just the opposite, he’d meticulously plotted her fall, so carefully laid the pillows to buffet her crashing descent by making sure that she landed into Rowe’s open, willing arms. Rowe! As much as Johnson hated Rowe, hated his demeanor, his politics, his speech, the way he dressed, the way he walked, his laugh even, especially hated the attention he turned on Verdi every chance he got, Johnson had bowed out, left, shown her his back, incurred her most fervent wrath in order that she might be cared for by Rowe.

  She felt objectified right now, as if she’d been a stuffed doll to be handed off between them, as if Johnson had said, Here, Rowe, she fell in the mud and got dirty, why don’t you take her over from here and clean her up? She was trying not to sob out loud as she pressed her hands tighter against her face, her emotions had gone to gray now with no clear demarcations of love or hate or gratitude or shame.

  Johnson was back at the booth standing over Verdi. The sunlight was still overflowing in the booth and at first he thought that’s why she was sitting there with her face in her hands. Then she made a sound from the back of her throat and another one and he recognized the sounds as unfulfilled sobs. He crowded into the booth next to her and put velvet to his voice and called her name, and took her head against his chest as she sobbed openly into his chest. He rubbed his hand up and down the back of her viscose suit and said a silent thank-you to Louis Armstrong and his trumpet for softening her up so. Though she hadn’t heard any of the selection that was just beginning to play for the second time. Not the blaring, melodic trumpet, nor Louis singing the part about a sweet Merlot, she’d heard only this as she sat there melting in the luminous booth in the back: Rowe calling out her name from the other side of that bathroom door over and over again.

  When she could dry her voice out enough to speak she pushed away from Johnson, she was facing him in the booth her back to the sun now. “You set it up, didn’t you?” she asked, her voice holding on to a plaintive whine.

  “Set what up?” he asked, squinting as the hostess-turned-waitress put down their breakfast without comment, and with deliberate attempts at being nonintrusive, and Johnson made a mental note to leave her a healthy tip as he focused in completely on Verdi.

  “What, Verdi, what?” he asked again as she dabbed at her nose with a napkin.

  “When you left, when you left campus, left Philly, left me.”

  He dropped the muscles that were holding his face in a congenial tilt. Knew that they’d have to go through this, shovel through layers of rocky mantle to get to here, this part of their lives so buried, but still so affecting, like a piece of uranium that only a Geiger counter can find that’s still disrupting the earth for miles and miles around.

  “Verdi—I—I, you know what condition I was in, how strung out I was. You know I had to leave or it would have meant an ugly death for both of us.” He lowered his voice as a stream of on-their-way-to-work types was seated at the booth in front of theirs.

  “You could have taken me with you, I was strung out too.” Her voice was still wet, her tone was more declarative than accusatory.

  “How? I didn’t even know where I was going, how I was going to live. At least there was hope for you, you know, a support system already in place. You, at least, could make it.”

  “But you decided how?”

  “Huh?”

  “How I should make it, how I should live?”

  “Verdi, I—”

  “You decided Rowe should be how I would make it.”

  “Verdi—Verdi—mnh.”

  “You did, didn’t you? Set me up so Rowe would find me then just turned your back on me as if you were giving me your ass to kiss.”

  He locked on Verdi’s eyes. Her eye shadow was smudged and specks of pink glistened on her nose. He tried to discover the correct words for the telling of it, in all these years he hadn’t been able to come up with the words, would lapse into a vat of sensations of having felt so gutted when he realized the course of events that would have to occur, as if his insides had been slowly and torturously pulled from him and then hung on a line like stained laundry flapping in the sun. He couldn’t find the words now, as he started rolling his hands in front of him trying to evoke the words.

  “I didn’t know the man was gonna leave his wife, goddamn,” he said, diving right in, not even trying to find a logical starting point. “Even though had I known, I still may have done what I did anyhow. I mean, really, Verdi, we both know he was your only hope at that point.”

  Verdi didn’t say anything, she barely breathed as she watched his face fade further into twenty years ago with each word he spoke.

  “I knew he could pull strings to make sure that the university didn’t boot you,” he continued. “I knew he would make sure you got the, you know, the appropriate care like doctors and psychologists, I figured he’d, you know, enlist his wife in your recovery and that she’d be sympathetic, a sociologist and all. You know, I even—even,” he coughed and sipped from Verdi’s orange juice, “I guess I knew he had a thing for you, the way he was so attentive, I’d even catch him looking at you and it was disgustingly obvious how badly he wanted you. I suppose I could have gone to Kitt and Posie, but I mean, I wanted to save them that devastation if it was at all possible, you know they were so proud of you, they had you on such a pedestal, I mean deservedly so, you know, you were just so much their heart. I mean, what can I say, and honestly I didn’t want to lose them either. You know. I knew someday they would forgive me for fucking my life up. But yours? They would hate me forever for fucking up your life. I was afraid to tell them, I was a coward. I was all in. I couldn’t help you, I couldn’t help my damned self. I was broke, had punched out of school, owed everybody who used to care about me, I mean I was gonna have to revert to stealing just to maintain, you know, shoplifting, or breaking and entering. Either that or commence to bleeding you. Had I stayed it would have only been a matter of time before I had you tapping into your trust fund, or wherever your daddy had your nest egg secured. So I took your money that Saturday night, you know in all the times we’d gotten high, that was the first time I ever took any real money from you. So I copped enough for both of us and then I shot enough for both of us too. I pumped yours and mine into my arm that night. You know, I was hoping it would just take me on out, you know, just OD. At that point I was better off dead anyhow. And had I gone up to Bug’s I could have OD’d. Would have pulled it off cleanly, but I was jonesing, didn’t want to take the fifteen minutes to go into West Philly so I copped from the car that used to sit in the middle of the super block. And the motherfuckers lightweighted me and I barely got, you know, got on, less more died. And when I started coming out of it, I knew I had only a small window of time when my thinking could approach a normalcy, you know before I’d need to get high again and all of my life force would be focused on copping again. I knew Rowe would be in his office probably grooving off of his argyle vest and
telling himself how wonderful he was. So I called you, you know, I, what can I say, I baited you. Then I bee-lined to College Hall to his office, I just opened his door without knocking and slid on in. And I suppose I didn’t have the appearance of a choirboy right about then because he looked at me with a terror in his eyes, as if I had come in there to rob him, and honestly, Verdi, at that point I vacillated, I swear I was considering just knocking him over his head with his cast-iron desk lamp and taking his watch and any cash he had, his desk set could have gone toward a bag, honestly. Verdi, had I gone in there maybe an hour later when the jones was telling me what to do I would have hurt him, I hated him with such a passion anyhow, especially after he looked at me as if he expected it anyhow.

  “But I didn’t, I guess somebody must have been praying for me, you know maybe Posie and Kitt, maybe my mother if she knew how, or maybe somebody was praying for Rowe because I do believe his life was spared that night, it would have been easy—you know, but like I said I didn’t do anything to him. He asked me what did I want barging in there like that, he stood up slowly as he asked it, looking from my face to my hands. And I asked him if he could spare ten dollars. Hell, I was a drug addict, at that point I had no shame, at least I figured I could get one more bag before I hitchhiked away from Philly. And his response was what I expected. Told me to leave, said I was a disgrace to my family and community and the school, it was my ilk that made it hard for legitimately talented black students to get in because the admissions people could point to the stats crowded with black people like me. I wanted to tell him that white boys get strung out too, that nobody makes a proclamation that no more white boys can be admitted into the university because some of them dib and dabble in drugs. You know, I think I did say something to him like a white boy at least being free enough to get high without strapping his whole race on his arm with him. And of course that enraged him and he told me to get out again, to go pervert scholarly thought about race with some other professor. And I asked him again for the ten dollars. And he sat back down and opened his book, apparently I was no longer a threat to him and he asked why should he give me a tarnished penny, and I said that if he wanted to save the life of his prized female student he should give it up. And then he came at me with his short-assed self, I’m telling you, Verdi, his life was truly spared that night because I would have taken a man down twice his size for coming at me like that, you know all the hate I had toward him, but I let him come at me, at that point it was for you, it was all for you. And he reached up and grabbed me by my collar and started shaking me, asked me what was I talking about, what had I done to you, if I wanted to live, you know shit like that. And I think I even started crying when I told him your condition, I think—I know I was begging him, you know asking him to help you stay in school, get you some help, that as long as I was on the scene that wouldn’t happen, but I was leaving, I was going to stay away once I left, so please, please get you some help. And he asked where you were, and I told him you were supposed to meet me right outside, that you would be there any minute, and then he was pacing up and down his office, I guess figuring out what he should do, and I still asked him for the ten dollars and he picked up the unabridged Webster’s off of the pedestal stand and hurled it right for my face, thank God it was so heavy and his aim was off, and I bolted then but I was just a little too late because you saw me, and you were calling me, and I wanted to turn around, God knows I did, but I knew I surely couldn’t turn around, couldn’t have your eyes on my face, I never could deny you anything once you put your eyes on my face, that’s been as addicting to me as heroin. The feel of your eyes.”

  He sipped some more of Verdi’s juice when he was finished. His voice had felt so raw coming out of him like that, propelled out actually by his entire being it seemed because all of him was drained right now. He exhaled loudly and then slumped against the booth back. He didn’t look at Verdi now, hadn’t looked at her the whole time he talked, just stared straight ahead as if seeing the whole scene click before him like 3-D images through a viewfinder. But even though his words had stopped, the images continued on in front of him. He watched himself that night thumbing a ride to the turnpike, and another one to Harrisburg but the big rig driver forced him out in Reading because he started gagging and going into the shakes, and ended up a scrambled heap on the side of the road inhaling his own stench and begging for the ground to open up, begging to be accepted into the barb-wired gates of hell, because surely that couldn’t be worse than this.

  Verdi had her hand on his wrist and she shook him gently. She knew all too well how consuming it was to travel there, could stay locked up back there for hours at a stretch if she allowed herself, which is why she avoided it, so terrified that maybe one day the hell of it all wouldn’t resound as clearly and she might allow a molecule of temptation to be laid.

  “Let’s go, Johnson,” she said gently, strands of compassion, of tenderness toward him mixing in and then overpowering her plethora of feelings the way that a pinch of thyme takes over a stew. “Cheniqua’s over there stashing on us and I do believe she’s gonna bounce us out of here with her bare hands in a minute.”

  Johnson straightened himself up and blinked away the scene clicking noisily in front of him; he’d just reached the part of his dip into hell where he’d spun himself into a hysterical ball on a naked cot in the corner of some county-run shelter for indigents. But now, suddenly, he was looking into Verdi’s face again. He almost said something like damn, Verdi Mae, I’ve just gone from hell to heaven in a blink of an eye; he didn’t say it though, thought it too trite a thing to say, just allowed the unclothed truth of it to drip steadily and spread through him like olive oil, helping him to come unhinged after the memories he’d just experienced that would have otherwise left him so caged and internally bound.

  He reached into his pocket and pressed a twenty-dollar bill on the guest check next to their untouched food and then handed it to the hostess-now-waitress. “No change back,” he said.

  The waitress grinned and squeezed his arm and apologized for the overbearing sunlight, said she wished he’d tried just a taste of the food. “Meals here are so good, sweetness, I know you would have devoured the whole plate after the first touch of it soaked into the tip your tongue,” she said.

  He told her he was positive she’d be serving up someone with the appropriate appetite before the morning was done as he slid from the booth and extended his hand to help Verdi out. He put Verdi’s trench coat on her shoulders and tried to keep himself contained, from just spilling out all over this diner floor as they moved toward the chrome-backed double glass doors, and it sank in that they were headed for the maroon Grand Am, headed to his leased apartment that was just five minutes away.

  Twelve

  Verdi ended up taking the whole day off. Called her school and said she thought that she had a sinus infection, slight fever, bad headache behind her eyes, very bad, so bad she was going straight to her HMO to get a prescription for antibiotics and then right home to bed. And she really did have a headache. Watching Johnson’s face fold in on itself the way it had as he convinced her that he’d not left her, that actually he’d left for her. Then trying to find her own words on the ride over and an hour beyond that as they sat in the maroon Grand Am in the darkened underground parking lot to Johnson’s building, and Verdi almost whispered she talked so softly when Johnson stammered that he’d hoped it had not been too much like hell as the fog lifted for her while she was coming out of her addiction.

  “It wasn’t like hell,” she said on an extended breath that was raspy, as she stuck her hands into her trench-coat pocket. “It was hell, it was as if I was crawling on my belly. No one but the devil himself should go through what I went through coming out of it.”

  Then she stopped herself. His jaw was clenched and she could see the hard line of it even in this darkened car, could tell that he was trying not to cry and the sight of him sitting there, hand squeezing the vinyl-topped gearshift, looking so tur
ned inside out as if she could see all the hurt he was trying to keep contained, the contusions left after years of blunt trauma, and she wanted to jump out of herself and become stronger than him, to protect him for once. She tried, opened her arms ready to take his head against her shoulder but he put his hands up in front of him.

  “You can’t take this from me, Verdi Mae, I need to feel it,” he said. “Me. It’s a consequence and I own it, will not let it become yours.” His words were suddenly acute, as if they brandished knives and then he fell silent, and threatened to crack his molars he clenched his jaws so tightly, and held his eyes wide open so that dry air in the maroon Grand Am would absorb the moisture accumulating in his tear ducts.

  She insisted that he not hold himself responsible for stringing her out, that she was so wildly curious back then she would have tried it in some other venue eventually, she believed that. He reminded her though that ultimately it was him who tied her arm and shot her up.

  They were quiet for a time until Verdi found his hand and squeezed it as she asked him how he’d turned away from it. Johnson chronicled his introduction to the Twelve Steps after he was arrested for vagrancy and sentenced to a rehab in Williamsport; then Verdi described her weekly therapy sessions, no one really ever knew how she’d bottomed out except for Rowe and Penda, she said, lowering her head, her voice the way she always did when she referred to Penda as she told him how Rowe and Penda had kept her with them during all of that November, even fashioned a story to her parents and to Posie and Kitt about a Thanksgiving retreat they were sponsoring at their home for some of the semester’s special students. “Rowe did make some calls on my behalf to a few of my professors and Penda, Penda was just a godsend,” she said as she went on to tell Johnson that the weightiest consequence that she owned was the look on Penda’s face when Penda caught Rowe’s too-affectionate expression toward her as the three sat down to dinner one night.