They were out of breath by the time they practically burst through his apartment door. And once the door slammed shut and sealed them in the tiny living room an unfamiliarity descended as if they were about to become entwined for the first time. They stood facing each other; Verdi looked at her fingers, curled and laced her fingers. “Maybe I shouldn’t be here,” she stammered, “it’s so late and Rowe doesn’t even know—”
“Maybe you shouldn’t be anywhere else but here,” Johnson replied as he interrupted her and moved in closer.
“But, um, but I need to, I mean, what about, um, Rowe—”
“Fuck Rowe.”
“But you don’t understand—”
“I understand that my project here is just about done, I’ve done the foundation work, Troubled Waters is a real entity now, you know a grant writer comes in after me. I have no other reason to stay here now unless you give me one.”
“No! Done! My God, why you just springing this on me, how much longer?”
“I can milk it for another week, but essentially I’m finished.”
“One more week? You don’t mean you’re leaving town in one week.”
He had her face in his hands. Such a panicked look to her face. Such a small, helpless face. “I’m—I’m just floored, it seemed as if you’d be here, you know, at least through the summer, I mean where next, oh God, don’t let it be someplace all far. Awl. One week? No! Shit!”
He kissed her face as she spoke. Her face was so pliable as it just yielded to the press of his lips. How could he have ever expected her to save him? So unfair, even hostile of him to have hoped for that, she was just a girl, not even ripe in her womanhood, just a bud on a branch, an embryo, not even born, and he had hoped for her to save him. “I’m sorry,” he said as he kissed her lowered eyelids.
“Well, don’t be sorry, just don’t leave.”
“It’s not the leaving I’m sorry about, Verdi, not the leaving this time anyhow. I’m sorry because I put you where you never belonged, then I hated you for not holding your position, for not stopping me, for giving in to me, I’m sorry, I’m so, so sorry. You never belonged there.”
“Where do I belong?” she asked him and the air surrounding him as her eyes looked beyond him into the dark living room, thinking that’s how the days ahead of her would be, dark and formless like the living-room air if he were no longer here, no longer this close.
“Right here, baby. At least now, tonight, this moment, you belong right here.”
They stopped talking then. They tore at each other and pushed and squeezed and panted and gasped. They were rough and fervent and clawing and biting, and Johnson tried to slow it down, to go at it at a milder pace, but Verdi pressed her heels into his back, she so wanted—needed—for it to be ferocious right now; tenderness could come later, right now she just wanted Johnson to fill her up, fibrously, she could even let him go, retreat back to her safely packaged life with Rowe, she could spend a million more nights with Rowe if right now Johnson could fill her up, if he could be the one to take away, take away, please could he take away that dot of desire that started burning when she’d misread his eyebrow, could he? Could he take it away? “Please, please,” she started begging him and the sound of her voice like that made him come in a rush, and she did too, and in that instant as her center burst and spewed glitter that caused reverberating tingles wherever it landed she thought that she had actually hit her vein, that she was getting off not on Johnson, but from that poison that she’d once enjoyed in her vein. “Oh my God,” she cried as she clung to him, not allowing him to move. “Please God, no, no, no, no. Please God don’t let me want it again, Lord. Not like that. Never again. Please. Lord. No.”
Johnson didn’t understand, thought she was talking about him, being with him, thought she was begging the Lord to take away her desire for what they were doing right now, not what they used to do when they’d plunged needles into their arms and thighs. And since he misunderstood her he told her to go ahead want it. “It’s okay, Verdi,” he moaned in her ear. “You can want it, want it, go ahead and want it, baby, I want it too, all the time, I want it so bad I want you to leave your old man, I want you to come with me, if you want it, you’ll come with me, will you, Verdi? Do you want it that badly? Huh, how badly? I love you, Verdi Mae, so much, so much.” He was still inside of her and she was still holding on, squeezing him so tightly, and he started to kiss her face as he asked her, begged her to leave with him. And his professions of love and her squeezing him like that were making him throb all over again inside of her and he started moving again too. “Will you? Will you leave with me? We can even stay right here in Philly, but you got to leave him to be with me. Awl, Verdi, baby, please, please, please leave him, please be with me.”
“I can’t,” is all she said, all she could say, certainly couldn’t explain it, couldn’t tell on herself that after all these years she wanted to get high again. Couldn’t make him understand that it was Rowe who had protected her from that, and who else but Rowe would protect her, especially now, especially after feeling an enticement for it just now.
“I can’t. I can’t. I just can’t. You don’t understand. I just can’t.”
Johnson went limp then. Pulled himself from her and sat on the side of the bed with his back to her.
“You love him?”
“It’s bigger than just a question of love.”
“What is it, a question of debt?”
“He has kept me safe.”
“What are you, a lamb, you’re a grown woman, Verdi, you’re forty fucking years old, you make your own way, been making your own way, what? Is he the one telling you that you can’t make it without him, if so that’s shit, Verdi, pure bullshit. He hasn’t kept you safe, he’s just kept you. Period.”
“You wouldn’t understand, I mean you left, you got yourself together on your own, Rowe did it for me. Sometimes I think that it was his presence more than anything else that’s kept me from wanting to get high.”
“His presence kept you from wanting to get high? Whew!” he said, sarcasm making rings around his words. “That’s some heavy shit. Who the hell am I to compete with that. Damn. Yeah, you’re right, you better stay with him, I damn sure can’t promise you that I can control your desires. I know I don’t have that kind of power, wouldn’t want that kind of power over another human being, a pet maybe, a fucking collie, not another person though. Damn, the power to control someone else’s desires. Mnh. He’s a bad motherfucker. Scary too. Mnh. That’s some scary shit.”
He didn’t say the rest of what he’d been thinking. That if Rowe’s presence took away the urges for her, then maybe his, Johnson’s, presence was inciting it. He was even remembering now how fidgety she’d gotten on the porch when they were talking about the drug corner, had thought then he’d have to ask her about that, but then the thing happened with Posie and it was pushed completely from his mind. He didn’t mention it now. She might admit to it, might entice him into thinking that he could save her, that kind of scenario would have them both nodding again. He would leave sooner than later. It was better for them both if he did. “You should get up so I can drop you wherever you need to go,” he said, his words feeling like wood coming out of him. “To the hospital, to him, wherever.”
Nineteen
Hortense rushed into the hospital waiting room and the quiet of the room dissolved into Kitt’s and Hortense’s squeals and then sobs.
“Oh my baby, my poor, poor niece,” from Hortense as she held Kitt closely then at arm’s length so she could look her over.
“Auntie, I’m so glad to see you, God knows I am,” Kitt said, melting at the sight of this woman who could be her own mother, just a more prosperous version: same face with those downwardly slanted eyes and those healthy lips and those cheekbones that competed with the eyes and lips to be that face’s dramatic high point, though Kitt noticed now that her mother’s face had a softness about it that Hortense’s did not. “Verdi just left to go home, but she
’ll be back directly—”
Hortense cut her off then, said, “I’ll see Verdi Mae when I see her, right now it’s Miss Kitt who needs tending to, and that’s just what I came here to do. Now, your uncle Leroy’s parking the car, in the meantime, tell your auntie what exactly did they say about your mama?”
“Auntie, I’m so scared, they don’t exactly know how damaged her heart is, they think she may have suffered a stroke as well, if my mama doesn’t make it—”
“Now hush, just hush, we not even gonna think like that.” Hortense smoothed down Kitt’s locks as she spoke. “My sister is a strong, strong woman, I can’t wait to tell her so myself, she’s a full half of me after all, my twin, my twin and I just shut her out like I did all these years.” Hortense had stopped looking at Kitt, was now looking beyond Kitt to the plaque on the wall that said which hospital charity had furnished the room, not seeing that either, eyes going unfocused and cloudy. “You know, you always think you’re gonna have tomorrow to make things right with people, even when you’ve wanted to do it a thousand times, how many times have I told myself today is the day I’m going to pick up the phone and tell my sister how silly we’re being, that I miss her in my life, you know, and then some days you even pick up the phone, and then you say Lord have mercy, I can’t do it today, but tomorrow—”
Now Hortense was raining tears and Kitt was hugging her aunt, until Hortense straightened herself up, said, “Look at me, how foolish and selfish of me, I’m supposed to be here consoling you, and I’m all worked up over my own inadequacies, Aunt Hortense is sorry, darling. Come on.” She rubbed her hands up and down Kitt’s arms as she spoke. “Lead me to a ladies’ room, and we’re going to tame down that soft beautiful hair of yours, yes it is, even beautiful in those dreadlocks and that’s saying something believe me. And we’re going to repair our faces and find some tea and you going to spend a few minutes telling me what that angel-face Sage is up to these days, something to lighten our spirits a bit, and then once we’ve gotten ourselves good and composed, we’re going to go in to see your mama with our composure intact, and our calmness shall spread all the way to her heart, yes it will, now, and ease her heartbeat right into its natural rhythms, come on now, Kitt, darling, we can’t be of any good to another soul if we are not first good to ourselves.”
Kitt took her aunt’s hand, gold and platinum wrapping around four of her five fingers. She looked at Hortense fully with her meticulously coiffed silver-highlighted hair tapered at the nape of her neck, her perfectly arched eyebrows, her diamond-studded earrings, her spa-pampered skin, her richly threaded linen pants suit. She wished that her own mother had been blessed with such a soft life, had always assumed that Posie never got the man, the money, the trimmings, because somehow she hadn’t measured up, that it was an issue of intelligence, of worth. But how much her aunt sounded just like Posie right then, not just the tone of her voice that was smooth as chocolate, or the way she breathed with her words that made her voice rise and fall like a hymn, but the actual words she spoke, the common sense behind them is what struck Kitt right then. How wise Posie had always been, and how much Kitt now realized she’d diminished her mother’s wisdom, because, because why? she asked herself as she and Hortense walked hand in hand from the waiting room, because her mother hadn’t been Hortense, because Kitt spent her life angry at Posie because she always thought she’d been born to the wrong twin. Now she felt pangs that started in her stomach and rose up into her chest. Now she wanted to see her mother before they repaired their faces or sipped hospital Tetley tea. They had turned the corner at the end of the long hallway and Kitt told Hortense to go on, she’d meet her in the ladies’ room, that she’d left her purse back in the chair by her mother’s bed.
Kitt walked on tiptoe as she edged into her mother’s room hardly rustling the air around her, something about the in-and-out sound of that ventilator commanded absolute quiet in Kitt’s mind, almost reverence since the machine was taking breaths on her mother’s behalf. The curtain was pulled halfway around the bed and Kitt could see someone standing at the head of the bed, at first assumed that it was a doctor or a nurse except that she could see cuffed dress pants, nice leather shoes, knew that any intern on duty this time of night wouldn’t be dressed so. She remembered then that Verdi’s father, her uncle Leroy, had come with Hortense, and she was just about to step all the way into the curtained area when she heard him whispering, thought he was praying, so she stilled herself even more out of respect for a prayer issuing forth and listened to his voice and to the machine doing her mother’s proxy breathing. She realized then that he wasn’t praying, that he was talking to Posie, his voice soupy and low as if he were crying, or on the verge of crying; she cocked her ear, held her breath as his words seeped through the thin curtain. “Posie, get better, sweet sweet Posie,” he kept saying over and over again. “My first love, my sweet sweet Posie, my very first love. Mnh.”
Kitt had to cover her mouth so that she wouldn’t gasp out loud even as she reversed her steps to the doorway as quietly as she’d come in. It wasn’t just Leroy’s words, his profession of love for her mother that caught her breath right then, it was the sight of the outline of Leroy’s back shadowing against the thin yellow curtain. She knew the backs of men after all, had been studying their construction, their anatomy most of her adult life, had been so affected by the sight of that one back in her childhood that her mother had cried more for than all the others combined, so much that Kitt had cried too and felt that one’s walking-away as her own personal loss. Recognized that back now in silhouette form against the curtain: the short neck, the wide, rounded shoulders that tilted higher on the right so that the back appeared to be in a lean and caused a pronounced lopsided jutting of the shoulder blades. No mistaking it. It was him, Uncle Leroy.
Now she’d have to strap this also onto the accumulating baggage of wrongs she’d have to make right, that she’d never fully believed her mother when she insisted that Leroy had loved her first, that her twin sister had connived him away, that he’d tried to come back to her, Posie, even after he and Hortense had been married for several years, that Posie hadn’t let him get any farther than the front porch, tore her heart out of her chest to do it, but he had a wife and a daughter that were legitimate, not only that his wife was her twin sister and she would never allow herself to be in a place to come between that.
Kitt stepped all the way out into the hallway now, she could no longer control her sobbing as she moved up the hall, past the lounge, the nurses’ station, on toward the ladies’ room where Hortense was. She could feel a thick line of resentment moving through her for her aunt, even for Verdi. Posie had after all been robbed of a more privileged life, and so had she, Kitt; what if she’d been afforded private schools, cotillion dances, college.
She pushed open the door on the ladies’ room, Hortense had repaired her face and was about to brush her hair. Kitt just stood there looking at Hortense’s perfectly remade face, tussling with herself because as much as she wanted to hate her aunt right now, she stopped herself—resentment is nothing but compassion that took a wrong turn, her mother often said—she could almost hear her mother’s voice in her ear saying those words. She relented then, allowed a compassion for her aunt to course through her instead, cognizant of how startlingly swift epiphanies can happen for a daughter when she watches her mother teetering on the line between life and death. At least her mother had experienced expansive gusts of passion throughout her life, had been truly loved over and over with the kind of fervor men are willing to die for. Started laughing and crying simultaneously as she pictured how her mother’s funeral would be, church packed to the rafters with a bunch of grown men bawling out loud. Wondered how many men would cry over her aunt. Wondered if there would even be one, her lip liner was applied with precision, but would there even be one?
Hortense looked at Kitt bursting with emotion, crying and hiccupping, and was she laughing too. “Lord have mercy,” Hortense put her hands to her c
hest. “Is she—is she?”
“No, no, I just, I just love her so—”
“Poor darling, poor poor darling, hysteria has taken over you, hasn’t it now?” Hortense said as she lifted her brush toward Kitt’s hair, and then realizing again that Kitt had a head full of locks, stopped and sighed and said, “Oh, what the hell, indulge your aunt Hortense while I pretend that you’re that little darling that used to spend summers with me and I couldn’t wait until bedtime so I could brush that hair that was soft and thick like your mother’s hair and I would pretend back then that’s what I was doing, brushing my twin sister’s hair.”
And even though Kitt’s hair was locked, and she wasn’t accustomed to putting a brush to it, she watched through the mirror as Hortense closed her eyes and stroked the brush against her hair, and she prayed that the compassion would stay the right course, that it wouldn’t take a wrong turn into resentment, because a resentment this large could eat her alive. Decided then that she was calling Bruce, accepting his invitation to massage her back for a change.
Verdi was back in the hospital waiting room, had had Johnson drop her back here instead of taking her home. She’d already connected with her daddy and was sitting under his arm both of them dozing by the time Hortense and Kitt returned from having their tea and from crying, and praying, and whispering words of endearment to Posie as they’d lingered at her bedside. Hortense was overcome at the sight of her sister like that and it was the sound of her mother’s sobs that woke Verdi and Leroy and they both jumped up to help Hortense and Kitt to the couch. Leroy and Kitt hugged each other politely. Verdi and her mother greeted each other profusely, Hortense reminding Verdi that it had been a full seven months since she’d seen her last, and then it was only because she’d come north for a sorority function.
Blues Dancing Page 27
