Trading Dreams at Midnight

by Diane McKinney-Whetstone

  Once he stepped into the club, the blue-colored air was actually a surprising relief, the sudden burst of warmth a relief too, as were the knowing sounds from a vibraphone, the smell of wine and designer perfumes. A long line of people chatted it up in front of him as they waited to sign in. He looked through the diminished light in here beyond the table gauging the turnout. Good turnout. Dove, the receptionist from his law office, sat behind the table checking names. Before Cliff could get to her, to say that a woman, Neena, would be showing up who wasn’t on the list, Dove had already lowered her rimless glasses gesturing with her eyes for Cliff to look at her. “Just one, so far,” she said as she scanned the foyer area. “You can’t miss, very big sixties hair.”

  Cliff knew that was most likely Neena. That was how they handled people who’d not anted up in advance. Cliff would introduce himself, make nice, extract a card, send a gracious letter the next day acknowledging their presence at the fund-raiser, extolling the virtues of the candidates they’d endorsed, the expense of running campaigns, not to mention the cost of uncorking all that champagne. A check generally followed from all but the severely obtuse or destitute. He made his way now from the foyer to the main room, shaking hands and slapping backs. He followed the blue air in here over to the soft pink of the bar area. That’s when he saw Neena. He still didn’t remember her from the other night and he wondered what else his preoccupation with Lynne was making him miss as he looked at Neena’s hair, thick and wild as if she’d just undone braids and not even finger-combed it, just let it stand and fall where it may. Bold of her, he thought, to wear her hair like this with this crowd that Dove called the St. John suit club. He liked that boldness. He thought that she had an odd-looking face, simultaneously soft and severe. Taken with the Crayola-black eyes, though, the tender, amorphous mouth; the mild brown complexion; the thick hair falling every which way; Cliff decided that she was in fact beautiful. Though he wouldn’t bother making a pitch for a donation because she was also broke. How did he know that? he asked himself the way he often did when he’d drawn a conclusion based on a quick observation, the rationale for which hadn’t yet leaked into his conscious mind.

  A granite-topped serving table separated them. Cliff became aware of the table when he rammed his bad knee into its base as he tried to make it over to where she sat. He refrained from grabbing the knee and hollering out, though he was momentarily stunned from the jolt that radiated out from his knee all the way to his toes, his scalp. It took everything in him not to grimace, not to limp as he walked toward her, extending his hand, taking her hand in his, saying, “Hello, Neena? Right?”

  “Yes, I’m Neena, guilty as charged,” she said as she tried not to look for too long in his eyes.

  “As a lawyer, Neena, I’d advise you never to admit guilt, at least not right away. May I sit?”

  “Please, feel free,” she said.

  “Feel free, huh?” he said as he eased into the booth. “I have to admit that’s something I’ve not felt for a while now, free.” He didn’t know why he said that, hadn’t even known that was the exact truth about how he felt until he’d said it. He laughed for levity’s sake.

  Neena continued to smile her gushy smile. “From what I can see of these people,” she said, “you appear to be the most free person in here tonight.”

  “I have to admit it, these aren’t generally my people here tonight.”

  “No? So what’s it like with your people?”

  “Ooh,” he laughed softly, “that depends on whether beautiful women like you are gracing the crowd.” He stopped himself. What was he, anyhow, an old man trying to get a rap going? Poor rap at that. He looked straight at Neena, about to apologize for bordering on the inappropriate. Her lips were smirked to one side playfully. He wondered if Lynne made such an expression when she sat across the table from whomever. His stomach tightened at the thought and he smiled so that he wouldn’t grimace.

  “So now, tell me about your unusual case,” he said as the barmaid stood over him and he pointed to Neena’s glass, and Neena said, Please, yes, another ginger ale, and Cliff said he’d have the same.

  “Actually, I’m going to be perfectly honest with you, Cliff, since you can likely spot a liar at fifty paces. I don’t really have a case for you.”

  Cliff raised his eyebrows. Now he saw what it was that told him that Neena was broke. The sweater. It had once belonged to his wife, he was sure, only because he’d given the sweater to Lynne, then shortly after he’d seen it in the top of the give-away bag headed for the Salvation Army. Lynne had apologized over and over when he asked her about it. “See, look what happened to it,” she’d said as she stretched it out to show him. “I wore it to that Maya Angelou reading and the stupid huzzy on the door insisted that she couldn’t let anyone in unless their name tag was prominent. So me, like a dummy, stuck the adhesive thing on the sweater knowing how delicate this kind of cashmere is. And then this happened when I peeled it off,” she’d said as she showed him the rectangular-shaped scar of pulled wool. He focused on the rectangular patch now as he listened to Neena admit that she didn’t really have a case to discuss with him.

  “Actually, I’m working tonight,” Neena said.

  “Yeah? What do you do? May I ask?”

  “Actually my employer sent me to seduce you, get you caught up in a scandal to bring you down. You’re raising too much money for their opponents, you know.”

  Cliff hadn’t expected that. He laughed out loud. A truly felt, unfettered laugh.

  Neena played with her straw. Her stomach was growling louder now, embarrassingly so as she listened to his laughter mixing with the vibraphonist’s competent strokes, the compressed energy spilling in here from the main room. His laughter so sheer and unclipped.

  “They wouldn’t have sent you,” Cliff said when he’d recovered himself. “They would have sent a white one. They always send a white woman when they’re trying to bring a brother down.”

  “Would that have worked with you?”

  “What, a white one?”

  “No, me?”

  “Oooh,” he said, his smile still hanging around his face, “that’s a setup if I ever heard one. If I say yeah, I’m saying I’m a gullible charlatan who runs around on his wife. If I say no, I’m saying you’re not irrestible. And I’m not about to say you’re not irresistible.”

  Neena lowered her eyes, feigning shyness, though she actually felt shy. The barmaid returned with their drinks and Cliff turned to speak to a woman who’d waved. Neena sipped her ginger ale and focused in on the vibraphonist who was stroking a sultry rendition of “’Round Midnight.” That had been one of her grandfather’s favorite songs according to Freeda. Once Neena, who had only heard the instrumental version, asked her mother what the words were and Freeda recited them and midway through Neena was sorry she’d asked and told her mother to stop. Thought the words too sad for her mother to be repeating since holding the sadness at bay was their greatest challenge. “Midnight is always sad,” Freeda had said. “Too many miles to travel ’til the sun rises. Unless you’re well enough to sleep, and fortunate enough to dream soft dreams.”

  Neena didn’t want to give herself over to thinking about that here and now. She’d thought much about it over the years during her own waking midnights, many sad. Though she’d also had her times for dreaming softly. Couldn’t bear the idea that her mother had not.

  Cliff ’s attention was back. “So you were telling me about how you’re setting me up for a scandal, Neena.” He laughed.

  “No,” she said. “You were telling me how you’re not about to say that I’m not irresistible, though I’ll have to diagram that sentence to figure out the double negatives.”

  “No need, two negatives always make a positive, right?”

  Before she could say anything else Dove was standing over Cliff, telling him that the mayor had just come in.

  “Tell him I’ll be over in five,” Cliff said.

  “You’re joking, right?” Dove
said, looking from Cliff to Neena, pausing to look Neena up and down, pursed her lips together then, her lips thin, colored in a muted pink shade of gloss.

  “I’m not joking, no,” he said, trying to keep the edge from his voice as he gave her that what-the-fuck-is your-problem look. She stashed right back over her rimless glasses.

  “It’s okay, really, I’ll be here,” Neena said. “You’ve got business, got to free the people.” She smiled at Cliff as she said it, darkening her eyes, though, as she glanced up at Dove thinking that Dove took her for a know-nothing in an Afro. She knew things. Smart. If she’d wanted, she told herself she could be dangling from the side of that same mountain that many of the people in here were dangling from right now. Trying to make it to the top. She’d recognized long ago that the top was a cruel illusion, especially for people like her. A mountain for Sisyphus to climb is all it was.

  Cliff got up then and bowed in Neena’s direction. He resisted the urge to reach out and stroke her face. He pivoted on the wrong foot and turned to walk away and felt another searing jab move up his knee, limping for real now, thinking, Fuck it, his knee was gone; he was fifty. No sense in trying to hide it.

  Neena took his limp to be a swagger and she smiled as she watched him walk away. She liked him, she had to admit. Though she couldn’t like him, not yet. Cloud her judgment if she gave over to liking him. Though right now her judgment was already clouded by her hunger. Her hunger really rumbling now without the distraction of conversation with Cliff. She’d have to get something to eat before the night slunk much farther along. Depending on how long Cliff would be, she might have to slip out of here before he even returned. There would have to be fast food nearby. A Wendy’s she remembered on Fifteenth Street, a McDonald’s on Broad on the other side of Market. Didn’t they have a dollar burger special going on now? She was salivating as she thought about a hamburger, a shake. God, what she wouldn’t give for one of Mr. Cook’s milk shakes with the thick chocolate syrup that wouldn’t allow itself to be mixed in so that it came up through the straw all solitary and potent and hung in her mouth and there it would finally blend with the thick cream of the shake. Or the chili he made in the winter that they’d have on Saturday nights after her shift was done and they’d close the store and she’d help him cash out and they’d sit in a booth exhausted and he’d call to his wife, “Okay, Mrs. C., time for you to do a little work for a change and serve me and baby girl.” The jalepeños would bring tears to her eyes but she just let the tears roll because she couldn’t stop eating the tender beans, the chunks of onions, the perfectly seasoned beef. She thought she would cry for real right now as she even pictured her grandmother’s chicken and dumplings, more than pictured, she could actually smell the pepper and the dough coming together in the pot, imagined how the chicken would just fall off the bone. Wondered if her grandmother still cooked like that. She was getting up there, seventy-six her last birthday. God, why did they have to so dislike each other, she wondered as her mind jumped from one of her grandmother’s specialties to the next: the sweet potato pies, the corn bread she made from scratch, the applesauce that she’d prepare in extra large quantities because people all the way at the other end of the block would smell the apples boiling, the cinnamon and nutmeg and butter going in, and suddenly they’d appear at the front door, starting a conversation with Nan, asking casually if that was her applesauce they smelled. Neena thinking now that Nan’s applesauce could give someone religion, thinking that she’d try Jesus all over again if she could have a bowlful right now, hot, with a couple of straight-from-the-oven buttered yeast rolls on the side. Her desire for food at that instant was so intense that she could barely catch her breath.

  And then Cliff was back, looking at Neena’s face in the candlelight; her face was flushed and he thought that the look was one of desire, thought that Neena wanted to be with him. He wasn’t sure what he wanted, knew what he didn’t want, though. Didn’t want to go home like a loyal puppy dog, panting after his wife, yelping for her to bring her head down out of the clouds, and once she did, looking at Cliff as if he was the troll that had just replaced the prince. And here was Neena with her palpable desire, her wanting that was so effusive that it seemed to hit him right at his throat, making him swallow first, then clear his throat, then grab at his tie because suddenly the tie was too tight, too heavy, though it was a light-weight silk. Suddenly the knotted pressure of the tie against his neck made him feel that he might gag, made him acutely conscious of the pressures in his life like his dementia-suffering mother-in-law living with them now, and the pressure of being middle-aged, presumably successful with his Italian leather briefcase and hand-stitched shoes, and oversized house in Chestnut Hill, while at his core a circle was spinning around and around fueled by a feeling of purposelessness. And there was Neena’s wanting that right now in the blue-lit air at this jazz club was better than church the way it zeroed in on his need to make an immediate adjustment in his life, loosen the damn tie so that he wouldn’t choke.

  Neena’s brows curved in a question mark as she watched Cliff undo his tie completely and just let it hang from his neck. She laughed then, a free fall of a laugh, and her oversized hoop earrings made circles of the blue light in here as she laughed.

  Now he was back to thinking about Lynne’s laugh as he eased into the booth. Wondered if this is how Lynne laughed when she sat across from whomever it was she was having an affair with. There it was, finally. He’d let the feeling take form, attached to it congruence, three simple words: she’s running around. Who was it? Who had moved in on his wife, moved against her with a compelling slow grind? Would have to be compelling, he was no slouch himself, he thought. And he’d been faithful. The whole fifteen years, like a hundred-yard punt return, he’d woven around the big-legged, curved-hipped temptations, the temptations so heavy with his own desire that he’d even had the breath knocked out of him once or twice. But he’d stayed on his feet. The goal line in sight, Lynne the goal line, he’d carried, carried rushing always back to her. Felt like such a fool that he had as he listened to Neena laugh. Felt like a mother-fucking, son-of-a-bitching fool. There was that rage again, that Cliff ’s-only rage that stood alone. And here was Neena affecting him.

  He didn’t know what is was about her, if it was the secondhand sweater, or the boldness of the nappy hair, or her quick wit, or that she’d put money in Bow Peep’s case that night in the snow, or even that he was being cheated on and Neena was here and available. How available, he wondered, as he looked at Neena directly? No play to his face, his voice, as he got in between her laugh and said, “Okay Neena. So why’d you call?”

  “Why’d I call?” She stopped mid-laugh and repeated the question. Pretended to be thinking about her answer as she picked up her glass. Though she’d known already what she would say.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Since you’re not a prospective client, what are you looking for from me?”

  She cleared her throat, then swallowed. “Actually, Cliff, I called because I’m just back in Philly after some years away. Not a lot of friends here anymore.” She pushed the sweater sleeves up to her elbows, then pulled them back down again. “And I have a possible job offer here, with Merck, pharmaeutical sales, so I’m thinking about settling here again and I just thought I’d put myself out there and follow up with people I’ve been meeting, you know.”

  “So what? You just randomly calling people or should I consider myself lucky?”

  “You know, I have to tell you, Cliff, no offense, but I’m not usually into lawyers, it’s really your friend, Bow Peep, who made me want to get to know you.”

  “Bow Peep? What’d he say?”

  “It’s not what he said, it’s just the fact that you know, you’d have him as a friend. It gives you a whole ’nother dimension. I’ve had huge affection for people like Bow Peep who the sane and proper might consider close to the edge, and I could tell a lot about a person by the way they responded to her?”

  “Her?”

>   “Yeah, a cousin, we were close?”

  “Is she still alive?”

  “No,” she said. She didn’t know why she said it, felt small explosions going off in her stomach reminding her that she was starving. “Anyhow, you know, I’m back here in Philly, and trying to make new friends, and then I was moved by Bow Peep’s flute playing and I could just tell that he has this really generous spirit and then I could tell, you know, that you really care about him. So I thought, here’s this lawyer, probably thinks he’s, you know, a real gift, yet his heartstrings are obviously pulled by someone who plays a flute while wearing sandals in the snow. It’s hard to explain—”

  “No, I get it, Neena. Really I do. And I really appreciate you saying that,” he said. “The guy is like a brother. Got messed up in Vietnam so I do what I can. Smart guy too.”

  “I’ve noticed. He’s kinda profound.”

  “Oh, so you two been talking, huh?”

  “I ran into him on my way here.”

  “Uh oh, he counsel you?”

  Neena laughed. “Well—”

  “You know that’s what he does. He believes that anybody who stops to listen to him play has a heightened sensitivity, you know, an evolved awareness. He believes he can help get them to the next level. And honestly, who am I to say he can’t? I know people tell him stuff, personal stuff that he never repeats because it’s like he respects a type of—what would you call it? A musician-listener confidentiality, I guess you’d call it.”