“Well, I hope I never have to see another jail. And those rotten photographers taking pictures that made us look like criminals.”
“Yeah, you looked pretty damn pathetic in the papers.”
“Did your brother get his horn back?”
“He did. Corelli fixed it fine, but Booker knows something happened to it. A musician feels his instrument’s pain like he’d feel his lover’s pain. I mean, if he had a lover.”
“Diana Jordan?”
“Oh, that’s over. You better believe that’s over.”
I went in and got us each a slice of chocolate cake, and when I brought it out I said, “I thoroughly intended to take credit for this cake and the potato salad, but I bought them at the Farmer’s Market.”
He nodded. “Yes, it’s better to start out with the truth.”
“Is that what we’re doing? Starting out?”
“Well, we do have matching shiners. For starters, I mean.”
We took off our shoes and brought the kite down to the beach, where we had some luck getting it aloft and no luck keeping it aloft. The Wilburs’ dog, Bruno, leapt over his small enclosure and bounded over, joyously greeting me. He was mad with doggy delight to meet Terrence, who responded to him right away. Bruno ran in and out of the surf, barking, chasing driftwood sticks that Terrence threw to him.
“You know,” he said, “I’ve never walked on a beach barefoot before.”
“There’s an art to it, you know.” I minced along under an imaginary parasol so that even Bruno quit racing and regarded me with some wonder. “Dig your feet in and the sand crabs will nibble on your toes.”
“Not sure I want crabs nibbling my toes.”
“I’ll show you how.” I dug my feet into the soft, wet sand, and so did Terrence. His eyes lit with mirth. “But they’ll only nibble a little. Then you have to find new ones. See?”
“And there’s an endless supply?”
“Endless.”
As we meandered past great beds of bronzy kelp that had washed up on the beach, I said, “I always think there must be whole tribes of mermaids somewhere, and these are their braids. When they cut their hair, their braids are carried away by the currents.”
He stopped and regarded me quizzically. “You are the living end, girl! Who would ever think of that?” Bruno brought the stick back and laid it proudly at his feet. “Good boy, Bruno!” Terrence flung it again, and the dog dashed off.
On this sunny May afternoon, those few people who saw us or passed us, white people, of course, all of them, gave us odd, disparaging looks as we ran barefoot on the shoreline and played with the dog. We wandered perhaps a mile up the beach before turning back and ambled south, a sense of connection between us as vivid as if that deer still somehow leapt, poised overhead. Our conversation roamed aimlessly over our respective pasts. He told three different stories as to how he’d come by the gold tooth, each one more outlandish than the last. Then he just laughed and said the truth was so dull, it wasn’t worth telling, like using your grocery list for the page one headline. As we walked back we marveled that Julia’s death had brought us obliquely together two years ago, and that Clarence, who had so loomed over my young life, had been a rock of Terrence’s childhood.
“When he’d get angry with me and Booker, Clarence would say, ‘You two are nothing but a handful of gimme and a mouthful of much-obliged, just like your daddy.’”
“He didn’t like your father?”
“Nobody liked my father. Not even my mother.”
“Did you like him?”
“I don’t hardly remember him. I was just little, six or so, when he died. Clarence did his best with me and Booker, but he had these standards that made us crazy. Still, he kept us in line for the most part. We had a couple of scrapes, of course—nothing too serious. Kid stuff. Then.”
This seemed an odd addition. “And since?”
“Booker’s in serious trouble.” He picked up a stick and tossed it for the dog. “Remember when I told you that heroin moved into Central Avenue and things were never the same? I know whereof I speak. Nothing we can do; no one in the family can stop Booker. He’s not as bad off as Bird, Charlie Parker, who just died a few months ago, but one day he will be. No one can reach him, no one can protect him.” Bruno brought back the stick and danced around us till Terrence took it from his doggy jaws and flung it down the beach again. “It’s terrible, watching someone you love be in such pain, and being powerless to help them, powerless to stop them.”
The sun had lowered in the sky and spilled a sheet of gold across the water by the time we returned to my place, and Bruno dashed up the steps ahead of us. We closed the door behind us. I leaned against it. Outside, Bruno yapped. Terrence took me in his arms and pressed me against the door, and we kissed for a long time, a long, slow, luxurious kiss, until the phone on the desk rang and rang. Finally I picked up.
Charlie Frye, full of anxiety, nagging me to offer his Coast of Heaven, now, while Empire loved him. I responded with random uh-huhs. Terrence went outside and sat with Bruno, staring out to sea, his dark profile highlighted in the unleavened sunshine. I told myself: Roxanne, this is your chance to be free of “The Stars and Stripes Forever” forever.
“Listen, Charlie, the Coast of Heaven is brilliant, and I won’t rest until it’s sold for ten grand,” I said, stunning him into momentary silence. “I’ll always represent your work, and be your friend, but the affair is over. No, I haven’t heard about you and Margie Becker, and really, I don’t care. No. I haven’t heard about Shirley or Enid either, and I don’t want an explanation.” I took the phone in one hand and, extending the long cord, stood in the open doorway with it. “I’ll still be your agent, of course. Of course I believe in Coast of Heaven, and I believe in your career, but the affair is over.” Terrence turned, and his eyes met mine. While Charlie nattered, I smiled and walked back inside. “Yes, yes, Charlie. No, the affair is finished.”
Terrence shooed Bruno down the stairs, came inside, and closed the door. He brought his lips to my neck and moved down my throat. The warmth of his hands penetrated my back, my shoulders, just as they had in the Comet Club. I caressed his close-cropped hair, his small, perfect ears. His bruised cheek against my stained one, he started to move as though he heard music, as though we were dancing, and then, in a manner of speaking, we were dancing, and I somehow said goodbye to Charlie as he blathered into oblivion, and I would have put the phone back on the desk, but it dropped from my hand as I wrapped both my arms around Terrence, who murmured against my ear something about being sure. Yes. Yes. Yes, I said as my personal tectonic plates shook, and the silverware rattled in the drawers as the walls waved and rippled.
He stayed till Monday morning. We ate all the ham sandwiches.
* * *
• • •
From that very beginning, our love affair was like a high tide sweeping everything in its lunar path. We fell in love the way that winter waves crash on the beach, a great whoosh of joy and discovery and emotion as our lives and bodies melded that summer. My better judgment constantly nagged at me, You saw what happened to Diana Jordan; this is madness. But it was a complicated madness, a rich, rewarding, and brilliant madness. Terrence Dexter endowed me with happiness such as I have never known. Loving him was like wine, a deep, complex melding of scents and flavors, swirled. We learned from and of each other, and in spite of—perhaps because of—all the vast differences in our lives and backgrounds, we each brought something fresh and resonant to the relationship. He loved my stories of the library conferences with the old writers, of Empire studio itself as my personal playground, of Julia and the Parc Monceau Thursday evenings, of L’Oiseau d’Or and the exiled, eccentric aristocrats who taught there. For all the fine private schools I’d attended, I’d never had a teacher like Dr. Browne of Jefferson High, who so shaped his students’ lives and values. I loved the stories of Ter
rence’s lively extended family, and the many times he and Booker did their best to outwit Clarence’s rules.
At night I would lay spooned beside him, listen to the sound of his shallow breathing, somehow in the same tempo as the waves outside, and wonder if all lovers knew this happiness. Surely we alone experienced this. With Terrence I let my emotions loose in making love, all sorts of emotions, the fine and socially acceptable ones and the ones I never guessed at, emotions that brought me to the edge of everything I had ever known or hoped to know. Our lovemaking could be tender love or rushed love, rough love, sweet love, rollicking, frolicking love; every time we made love, we deepened the bond between us. I taught him French, words, phrases best murmured in darkness, or by candlelight, and under the covers. He taught me things I never guessed at.
That little Malibu cottage itself seemed to throb with the happiness we created. Buddy Collette’s version of “Over the Rainbow” became my new favorite song. Terrence pounded out infectious high-spirited tunes or old hymns on the upright piano, improvising, especially lively variations on “Little Liza Jane,” for which he and I both made up verses, and soon Liza Jane came to be his sweet name for me, radiating so much warmth and easy affection that I glowed just to hear him say it. His tunes wove in and out of our daily lives, like “Wade in the Water” when we’d take naked midnight swims. In the mornings we would shower together, wash each other down and leave each other breathless. Then, my hair still wet, I stood behind him, my arms around his chest while he shaved; I laced his back with kisses while he smiled into the mirror. When he left in the morning, I stood on the porch wearing a robe, my hands wrapped round a coffee cup, and Terrence gave me a final swift pat on the ass and a kiss on the cheek and popped down the stairs singing, “‘O little Liza, little Liza Jane!’” By the time our respective shiners had healed, we had declared our love for each other, and I had given Terrence a key to the Malibu cottage. Home.
I liked the sound of it. Home. I enjoyed a little frisson of happiness every time one of us said the word we. In our working lives we each kept odd, nonstandard hours, and I would find myself looking at my watch when I had meetings or events that went late into the evening, finally begging off, popping into the MG, and racing up PCH, delighted to see the Porsche parked there behind my house and knowing that Terrence was home. If I came home and he wasn’t yet there, I waited to hear the rumble of the Porsche behind the building, when I would run down the stairs and he would catch me in his arms, and we would go inside, closing the door on the rest of the world.
Some nights he returned to the hot plate and garage on Naomi Avenue to be close to the Challenger, but he kept his starched shirts in my closet and his shaving gear in my bathroom, and, perhaps most intimately, he brought his portable Royal typewriter and set it up on the desk in the living room beside the two framed pictures of Julia and me. I liked to think she was smiling at him, and I knew she would be pleased to know we had found each other, loved each other. I read his columns at home and subscribed to the Challenger at the office. I smiled to hear him working in the evenings, the mad tap of the keys a kind of percussion against the jazz on the hi-fi, where I grew acquainted with Chico Hamilton and Art Pepper and Terrence learned to love Peggy Lee, though Sidney Bechet was still too old-fashioned for his taste, and he didn’t like Bill Haley and the Comets at all. The Sousa marches, needless to say, went in the trash.
We shared a sense of being somehow destined, fated for each other. We met at the right time. The longest and stormiest of Terrence’s affairs, the on-again, off-again liaison with Jaylene Henderson, had ended in January with a dramatic incident of infidelity on her part. As for me, the affairs of the heart I had known, they were like soda water, men who might have briefly sparkled but then went flat, dull, brackish as the local tap water. Charlie Frye was history. He only called occasionally when his confidence needed boosting. Professionally I obliged, usually while Terrence listened, grinning.
But I was grateful for the surfboard Charlie left on the porch. Terrence put it to good use all that summer, teaching himself to surf. He would lie on it and paddle out beyond the swells and sit there for a long time, his back to me, looking at the horizon. I lay on an old towel on the beach reading scripts, and one afternoon I looked up to see that Terrence had drifted far to the north. I ran down the beach and waded into the surf. “Terrence! There’s a riptide! Be careful! Terrence!” I cried, not even certain that my voice would carry that far. When at last he looked back and saw how far the current had taken him, he turned the board around and paddled hard toward shore, fighting the current. I ran up the beach, paralleling his progress shoreward. I plunged into the waist-deep waves to meet him as he jumped off the board and took me in his arms, and we made our way, waves washing over us, exhausted, to the beach, where we fell to our knees in the foam, wrapped our arms around each other, kissed and rolled on our backs, and caught our breath. I laughed out loud.
“What’s so funny?” He jumped up and ran after the surfboard before the sea reclaimed it, returning to me shaken and out of breath. “What is so damn funny?”
“The rolling-on-the-beach scene in From Here to Eternity! I always hoped I’d find a man who made me feel like that, and look, I have!”
“What are you talking about, girl! I could have died out there! And look at you! Flopped here like a piece of seaweed.”
“Yes! Don’t you see? That’s why it’s perfect!”
Terrence didn’t. The humor lost some of its luster when I had to explain the scene and the movie, and finally I just gave up. Terrence’s life, clearly, wasn’t reflected in film. Mine was.
We took long, almost-daily sunset walks on the beach, ignoring the stares of people—white people, who naturally were the only sorts of people there. Terrence made me think: Why is that only natural? Why does a Negro on the beach at Malibu so defy expectations? But mostly I was too happy to give a damn what anyone thought. And though I had not forgotten what Diana Jordan’s transgressions had cost her, I banished such thoughts and reveled in the summer days and summer nights.
On our sunset walks, Bruno always jumped the low fence and tore down the beach to be with us. Terrence knelt and rubbed his ears. “Hey, boy. Good dog. Good dog, Bruno.”
“He likes us better than he likes the Wilburs,” I said. “They’re small-minded and mean-spirited and Bruno knows it.”
“We’re young and beautiful, and in a hurry,” Terrence said, giving me a slight nudge with his hip.
“We are! And we’re going to do great things!” I cartwheeled twice down the beach, then returned to him, breathless and happy. “I’m going to find the next Casablanca, and you’re going to win the Pulitzer Prize.”
“Oh yeah,” he said, laughing and tucking my arm in his, “a black reporter winning the Pulitzer will be for his coverage of hell freezing over.”
The sun sank at the horizon, leaving a gleaming path across the sea, and I went into the kitchen to make us something to eat that wouldn’t tax my limited repertoire. I had pretty much mastered scrambled eggs, and I knew not to burn the bacon. From the living room I heard Terrence give a loud groan. I went out to see him sitting in the big chintz chair, the script of Fly Me to the Moon in his hand.
“What is it? What’s wrong?”
“Not another goddamn shoeshine boy and his jive dance!” He pointed to a scene in the script. “Clayton Strong is right, Cecil B. DeMille needs a couple of Nubian kings, and a lot of slaves to build the goddamned pyramids, but otherwise?” He pointed to the page. “Where are we? Chopping cotton and singing ‘My Old Kentucky Home.’ We’re prim Aunt Jemimas or cuddly Uncle Toms, or kids doing tap dances for an extra nickel from ‘de good ole white gentleman.’”
I glanced at the scene on the page, seeing it suddenly with new eyes. No wonder Terrence’s life wasn’t reflected in film.
“Your Church of Rick and Ilsa, it’s the Beverly Hills Country Club. Whites Only.”
&
nbsp; “One day movies won’t be like that.” I didn’t know what else to say.
“Really? You think one day you’ll find a screenwriter who’ll tell a story like Up from Slavery? Like James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son?”
These were books I’d only just read this summer—writers, honestly, I had only heard of since I’d met Terrence, never mind the private schools and Mills College. “Why don’t you write something that powerful? That true. No, really. You write it, Terrence. I’ll sell it.”
He scoffed. “You really think your granddaddy would buy a script by a black man? That any of your people—I mean it, Liza—from those Poverty Row cats, to the head of Paramount—would any of them produce a script by a man who looked like me?”
“We could say someone else wrote it, put another name on it. No one would have to know. Happens all the time.” I looked at him expectantly.
His expression suddenly changed, and his eyes narrowed. “Do you have some secret, Liza Jane—I mean other than the secret we’re keeping right here, right now? The two of us.”
I went back to the kitchen, turned off the stove, poured us both a stiff drink, and sat on the couch, my feet in his lap, while I told him the whole story, not just about Max and Thelma and Kathleen Hilyard coming to me, but the whole long story about the men whose names were on the movie posters in this living room. I told him who had died or fled the country or been shamed or professionally maimed, everything I had not told him that first day. Full dark had fallen by the time I finished.
Terrence stood and paced. He was a restless sort of man. “I gotta ask, why did you do it, Roxanne? I don’t mean finding fronts for your old friends, I dig it, you got gumption, girl. No, I mean, why take Max’s work to Leon?”
“I was still angry about Denise breaking up his marriage to Julia—well, I’m still angry about that—and I thought . . . well, I had all sorts of reasons, and they all made sense at the time.”
The Great Pretenders Page 17
