by Alyssa Cole
“That’s fine,” he said. “But before we start, I need to make something clear.”
“What’s that? That you don’t want me trying to sully your virtue?” The right side of her mouth lifted up, and it was so striking he was glad she hadn’t deemed him worthy of a full smile. His head went fuzzy for a moment, like when he was working in a hot kitchen and forgot to eat or drink.
“I was a sailor, Miss Hines. I have very little virtue left, and you’re welcome to it.”
That got a light laugh from her, as if his answer surprised her.
His grin faded as he tried to broach the uncomfortable topic that had to be tackled before they began. He didn’t know if it was necessary for her, but it was for him.
“Spit it out, Amir.”
“Dancing can be a very personal, spiritual, cultural thing for some. It isn’t for me. I can teach you some basic technical aspects, but I’m not going to be your guru.” He would have had to be Hindu to be a guru anyway, but the American craze for all things “exotic” didn’t care much about differences in religion, language, or caste.
She didn’t say anything and he tried again, softening his words. “I meant no offense. I know there are people paying good money for a brown man to teach them Eastern spirituality. I can’t do that for you.”
She let out a short, sharp laugh. “Oh, trust me, I know what people are willing to pay. Dance is all I want from you.”
He resisted offering up his virtue again; she was his boss, even when she teased him. He followed her through a hallway that branched off the dance floor to its end, where she unlocked a door that led to a flight of stairs. At the top was another door, which opened to a large apartment—large compared to where he lived, at least. He slipped out of his shoes at the threshold of the door, ignoring her confused expression, to take in the space where she lived.
The furniture was all dark wood and sharp angles, which might have meant the previous owner had been a man but could just as easily have been Bertha’s taste. Framed images adorned the walls, and shelves lined with books. He spotted something familiar and realized it was a variation of the poster he had seen in her office.
“Rajjah Ben,” he read aloud.
She was bent over the graphophone already, a round black disc balanced delicately against her fingertips, but she paused, head tilted and eyes wide as if the dance practice had already begun and she was striking a pose.
“‘Come see the mystic of the Far East and his dervish daughter,’” he continued. She dropped the disc down onto the turntable but didn’t move the needle.
“Well, I guess it’s best you know, especially given your little speech downstairs. I’ve spent half my life doing this kind of dance and still haven’t added up to more than a sad imitation. Story of my life.” She said the words on a faux sigh, as if they were a joke, but Amir knew better than that. There was a bitterness there that resonated in him, the same thing that vibrated in his marrow and bones when he joked about tea time or wearing his shoes in the house.
He kept his eyes on her, on that back so straight it might buckle from the strain. “If you were the dervish daughter, then Rajjah Ben was your father.”
She walked over to the couch and sat, began working at the laces of her boots. “Yes. He was a very talented musician, and a charlatan. Long story, short: he met an Indian man while performing in New Orleans, a trader like our Mr. Khan, and asked about the turban he wore and what it represented. The man told my father it represented freedom; he only wore it so Whites would leave him be when he traveled selling his goods. It was a ruse that people accepted because of the very little they knew about Indians. My father became obsessed. With the culture, with the music, with the fact that a man darker than him could travel wherever he pleased just because he was neither White nor Black.”
Amir studied her face, and the careful absence of expression that told him just how deeply her father’s decision had affected her.
She shrugged. “One day while traveling for a show, he bought a strip of linen, wrapped it around his head, and entered a restaurant that served Whites exclusively. He nearly sweated the thing through, way he told it, but when the manager came up to him, he asked him if he was a dignitary instead of telling him to get out. Rajjah Ben was born that day. He acquired fancier turbans, elaborate robes. An accent that would make you cringe. I’m sorry.” She glanced at him to catch his reaction. Amir’s neck tensed, but how could he blame her for her father’s obsession? “His dervish daughter joined him a few years later, once she’d finished primary school and the dancing lessons he’d set up for her.”
“And your mother?” he asked.
“My father thought she was too obviously Negro to pass, and she refused to pretend to be otherwise anyway.” She shrugged. “He kept me on the road for months at a time, the stretches getting longer as I got older. One day she wrote to say she’d found a new man, one who didn’t want her to be something she wasn’t and who didn’t pretend he was either.”
The wistfulness in her voice was faint, but knowing her, it only hinted at the true depth of her pain.
“They live in Chicago now. They came to see our show with their two little boys during our final tour a while back, and I brought the boys—my brothers—onstage to participate. It was nice.”
She looked at him. Amir didn’t know what to say. He knew America was not fair—his own attempts to get citizenship had proven that. But the desperation that led to the creation of Rajjah Ben, and to Bertha’s loss, was not unfamiliar to him.
“Back home, the change began slowly, they said,” he said. “I was too young to notice, but my father railed against the men wearing British trousers and their ridiculous hats. ‘Next they’ll paint their faces white!’ he said.” He looked down. “Have you noticed my accent? How it’s different from Ali Khan’s?”
She nodded.
“When I got to Calcutta, a drunk saheb bumped into me. I told him to watch where he was going and he mimicked my accent, roaring with laughter.” His face still heated, thinking of how ugly and shameful his words had sounded spat back at him. “I spent months getting rid of it, trying so hard to sound like the people I hated. Because I knew there was opportunity in erasing the parts of me that they found laughable.”
There was a noise as she stood from the couch. Her heeled boots were gone, and it surprised him, how small she really was. Bertha didn’t feel small.
“I know some people find psychoanalysis stimulating, but I’m not one of them. Shall we dance?”
Her voice was so silky smooth that it took a moment for the slap of her words to hit him. He’d never told anyone that about himself and she had brushed it away. Then he looked at how her chest rose and fell, at the way her lips pressed together, and remembered that to a ram, butting against a wall was less painful than a blow to the flank that took it unawares.
“I had an accent once, too,” she finally said when he didn’t respond. Then she raised her arms and cupped her hands, as if waiting for the rain to come and fill them. “Shall we dance?”
It was an order this time, but a gentle one.
He took a deep breath. “Of course. Show me what you’ve got.”
Chapter 5
“Okay, lift your shoulders, then turn your hands like…so. Yes, like that. Press your fingers together harder. Make sure your feet hit the floor three times. Like this.”
Amir executed the move he was explaining, and Bertha nodded, but mostly to the thought that was running through her head.
He’s gorgeous.
This was their fourth session and it was getting harder to fight those kinds of thoughts, the ones at odds with the standards she had set for herself once she took over the Cashmere. Once she’d regained control of her own life. But Amir’s shirt was off, thrown over the arm of her settee, and he stood there in his undershirt, suspenders hanging down over his trousers, and a fine sheen of sweat on his arms and face.
She tried the move again, finishing in the pose of invitatio
n, but already knew she hadn’t done it quite right by the expression on his face. He wasn’t demanding, or exacting—his expression was one of indulgence. It was kind. She hated it.
She didn’t know exactly why she had agreed to the lessons; she supposed that like Janie, she couldn’t turn down the chance to see what could have happened if she’d been given proper tutelage. That, and she couldn’t pass Amir every day and live with the knowledge that he’d found her lacking.
“Here, let’s try this.” He turned and reached into the pocket of his jacket and pulled something out, then came and knelt before her. “Put your foot on my knee.”
She looked down at his thick black hair, at the whorl in the middle that would not be tamed by his pomade. She had never seen a man from this angle, she realized; she’d been with so many, but she had always been the one kneeling. An unwanted arousal bloomed in her as she lifted her bare foot and rested it on the curve of his bent leg. His kneecap poked into the sole of her foot as he shifted his weight and she let out a soft gasp. She wasn’t one for soft gasps, so when he looked up at her, she was sure he saw that her brows were raised with surprise at herself.
“Ticklish?” he asked, grinning. His two front teeth were a little too large, but for some reason that only made Bertha think of how they’d feel pressing into her inner thigh.
Don’t think it.
She tried to school her thoughts, but her resistance to the images flashing in her mind didn’t stop the heat dancing in her belly like Salomé. She found that she was still able to blush, after all this time.
“Just a little,” she choked out.
“Then I’ll be more gentle,” he said. He opened his palm, which she had felt on the flat of her back or at her wrist or on her shoulders over the last week, and revealed two strings of tiny silver bells.
“Is this so you can hear me approaching when you and Cora are gossiping in the kitchen instead of working?” she asked. Jokes were good. Jokes distracted from thoughts that had nothing to do with Congress or the Cashmere and everything to do with how his hair would feel beneath her fingers. She wasn’t one to miss an opportunity to take what she wanted, though...
She wobbled a bit, making sure not to overplay the quick jerky motion, then laid her hand on his head to steady herself. His hair was thick and silky and the warmth of his ear pressed into her hand; there was something strikingly intimate about feeling that delicate shell against her palm. She was about to pull her hand away, when she was distracted by the unintended consequence of her ruse. There was a jingle as his hand darted up and cupped behind her knee to steady her, but this touch was different from the light taps and corrective nudges of their lessons. It was his fingertips pressing into her skin through the thin material of her pants, his palm and digits exerting strength to grip and hold her in place.
Bertha swallowed hard and shut her eyes against the quick, sharp longing that lanced through her. He was completely still, unmoving save for a racing pulse where her palm met his ear. She couldn’t tell if it was hers or his. Amir didn’t move for a long moment, then released his grip on her. It wasn’t a quick motion, but a slow caress that sent a tremor through her.
“You don’t need bells to announce your presence,” he finally said as he tied the string around her ankle. His voice was lower than it had been, the air around them a bit more charged, like the feeling in a room right before she launched into her dance.
Bertha was so focused on his touch and her response to it that, for a moment, she forgot what he was talking about.
His fingertips grazed the skin and bone of her ankle as he tied, each touch sending little shocks through her that marched steadily towards her apex like the soldier boys parading down Fifth Avenue.
His shoulders rose and fell on a sigh, then he looked up at her and grinned, and it wasn’t until his dimples sank deeper—an indication of growing amusement—that she realized what he wanted. She switched the foot that rested on his knee and reminded herself that she was indifferent to his presence as he tied the second string. That his touch did absolutely nothing at all to her. He was just a man, and one in her employ at that.
“There,” he said, standing. There was only the slightest darkening across his cheekbones, and in his eyes, to show he’d felt even a fraction of what she had. “This is a bit of baiji—natchni, a form of the kathak we were already doing.”
“Like nautch?” Her voice came out smooth, no breathiness, no husk. She couldn’t let him see that he’d affected her any more than she had already revealed. Once a man knew he affected you, he started getting ideas, and in Bertha’s experience those ideas were never good for her in the long run. Getting the Cashmere from Arthur had been a stroke of luck—cunningly executed, but luck all the same. She couldn’t go all soft-headed over a man now.
“Yes. A version of nautch is what has been exported to Britain and the US.” He had enough tact not to show his disdain.
She’d occasionally gone to nautch shows to pick up new techniques, when it was allowed; sitting in the Colored section of the theater as a White woman whirled to Indian music.
“Traditionally, a natchni would travel with her husband, or master, and dance and sing while he played. After the performance…” He looked away from her. “Nevermind.”
Something about his expression pricked at her. She knew very well what happened after performances, no matter the country or culture. Men wanted what they had just seen, and if there was a “master” in the mix, he likely profited from that. Her father had never done so, and had gotten into brawls when admirers pushed their luck. Arthur had been a good egg, but he hadn’t been possessive; men offering the right price had been able to indulge their fantasies of Bertha in nothing but her bangles.
You don’t mind, do you? You know we got bills to pay…
“I’m going to clap, since we have no drum here,” Amir continued, and Bertha shook away the thought. “For each clap, step firmly once so that you match it with a jingle.”
He began clapping, looking at her expectantly, and irritation tugged at her like a rough john. She held up a hand, but not to dance.
“First answer this: in addition to people from the expanded Asiatic Barred Zone, what other group is no longer allowed entry into the US effective February fifth of this year?”
He cocked his head to the side, eyes turned up as if he searched for the question on her ceiling. “Apart from madmen, criminals, and any other bogeyman politicians could think of? Apart from people like me?” He met her gaze then. “Illiterate people. People over the age of sixteen must take a literacy test before being allowed entry. The same way Blacks in your Southern states are given tests before being allowed to vote.”
Bertha raised her brows. “Very good. You’re right, with the exception being that there’s a chance of passing the test immigration gives foreigners, whereas the tests for Negro citizens are generally not passable.”
He nodded, then worried his bottom lip a little like he did when he was turning something over in his mind. “Does it make you hate your country? Knowing such things happen and no one stops it?” He ran a hand through his hair and Bertha’s fingers flexed. “I felt a kind of hate in my heart before I left home, and I thought it was for my country, for what the British had made it. Now I don’t know.”
Bertha had felt that churning, directionless rage. Every time her father forced her to straighten and curl her long hair because an Indian girl wouldn’t have the naps that even her “good hair” didn’t hide. Every time someone directed bile at her because they knew she was Negro, and every time they fawned over her because they fell for the lie that she wasn’t. Every time she felt glad when she was allowed something that America generally kept from citizens like her because she had tricked others into thinking she was foreign.
Girl, people see what they want to see.
“I don’t hate America.” She resumed her position, arms raised. “If I hated it, that would be admitting they’d broken me. We can both clearly see that
I’m not broken.”
She stood with her back straight, and her gaze trained on the wall behind him. It was how she had stared into the back of the crowd before beginning her dance so she wouldn’t have to see the anticipation for the whirling, spinning lies she was about to create.
She pursed her lips. “You said you were going to clap.”
He let out an indulgent sigh and then bought his hands together hard. Bertha closed her eyes, listening to the jingle as she stepped her feet in time.
Later that evening, she swept through the club, knowing all eyes were on her. Her dress was scarlet and so were her lips. The dress was loose fitting but still managed to cling to her curves, and the hemline brushed well above her knees. Her hair was pulled back into a heavy bun; she looked longingly at the younger women with their chic short cuts that didn’t require hours of straightening and pinning and curling and wondered how freeing it might be to simply walk into the salon and tell Nell to cut it all off.
She was dressed a bit more revealingly than she had since taking over the club; before, when she had been one of the girls smiling at patrons and hoping to hook one to take to a back room, Arthur had insisted she wear as little as possible.
“Show them thick thighs of yours,” he’d say, grabbing and squeezing. She’d acted like she enjoyed his rough touch because there had been no other option and, hell—sometimes she hadn’t been acting. He’d been the source of power and protection in her world, and if he took a cut of her earnings and felt entitled to her goods, her lot was still a sight better than most women in her position. And she had no regrets; eventually, Arthur had gone from pimp to husband. Then he had passed away. She’d slipped into widow’s weeds and cried—that hadn’t been an act either—then held out a will with had her name listed as inheritor while her eyes were still rimmed with red. The Cashmere was hers, and now the girls didn’t have to offer their bodies to anyone they didn’t see fit to.
