by Melvin Dixon
Ruella looked at me hard, her eyes scratching at something. Sunlight glistened in her short hair. My scalp itched with splinters I couldn’t wait to scratch out. “It was strange, but beautiful,” she said. “Real beautiful.”
I started giggling for no reason at all.
“Look,” she said. “Forget what I said just then. I don’t know you, really. You’re charming.”
“No, I’m not. Who wants to be charming, anyway?”
“Well, graceful, then. You move gracefully.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“Are you auditioning for the company, too?”
“I hope so,” I said.
Below us a subway train screeched to a halt. Ruella looked worried. Her mouth grew tight. “Don’t make me miss my train, now.”
“I won’t.”
“I want to be home before it gets too dark.”
“Let’s get together again. To work on that dance,” I said.
“I don’t know, really. It was great, but I’m not sure I can get that high again. That’s why I don’t like improvs, not really. It’s like, well, meeting someone, and after the rush of excitement, it’s gone.”
“What about the beginning of a friendship?” I asked, watching her.
She smiled, then tried to hide it.
“We can work on the dance, at least.”
“Just the dance, Jesse?” Her eyes still searching. “I’ve got to get going.”
“See you again? In class, I mean.”
“Sure.”
“How far are you going?”
“To the West Side. Eighty-fourth Street.” Ruella bounded down the stairs. Then she was gone.
I wanted to dance again and to keep on dancing. The song and the improvisation came back to my mind, moving my feet as I walked home up 8th Street. My stomach was still contracted and made my steps light. I sang the song over to myself, trying to imitate Simone’s raspy voice, but nothing but my own flat drawl came through. I thought of Ruella, then remembered Metro waiting for me at home. I changed more than the pronouns.
He does not know his beauty
He thinks his pale body
Has no glory
If he keeps dancing naked
On the pier …
No, that’s not it:
There are no palm trees
On the pier …
I must have laughed out loud because people started moving away from me on the sidewalk. Some went into the street. I kept singing and smiling. I’d tell Metro about the dance, about Ruella. In that brief moment she seemed to be a place to come to, a pier without splinters, a cozy room, not a warehouse.
I thought of Metro’s thighs warm against mine, how close our faces held in making love, how wiry were his hands. But how lasting were those images? I walked faster. Suddenly, my toes were burning.
I reached the apartment, but he wasn’t there. I waited for him through the early evening. I scrambled some eggs for dinner and read GQ twice. I waited for him through the night. I waited and waited. The more I waited the stronger was my desire for him. I wanted his hands on me. My legs still ached from dance, and when they relaxed I tried to sleep.
I wanted his hands on me. I didn’t mind the cracked, chewed skin, the broken fingernails with flecks of dirt along the ridge. I wanted those hands on me, the blunt knuckles, the wrinkled skin, the bony joints, the tiny hair sprouts curling out. I wanted his hands on me. And wherever those hands led, I’d follow. I’d ride the tracks of his feet and the rough guardrails of those hands. Five fingers and five more. I wanted the electricity of his touch, his hands on me. How many times did I tell him, “Just touch me. Dance your fingers on my chest, my thighs. Press my flesh. Take off my clothes real slow.” But when he touched me, my excitement dwindled into fear. His hands fluttered, suddenly unsure of themselves, of where they would land and do their marvelous work. I bent low and let his fingers drum on my belly. Then calmly they stroked where my secret skin was softest. He lifted away his hands and hid them. His lips found the tender places left aching by his touch. And when my hands kneaded him in turn—everywhere—nothing afterwards felt the same.
Then morning. An alarm shooting through me like the song. A knock on the door. Police.
They asked if Metro lived there with me and I said yes. They looked as if they expected me to be white or have something to hide. They told me to come with them downtown.
Metro lay in the city morgue. He had been stabbed eight times.
I couldn’t look at him long. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t see. I grabbed for something to hold on to. The room whirled red, then black. The next thing I knew I was being lifted from the floor. When I could hold steady, they wanted to know his real name. My mouth was too dry to speak. Finally, in a voice hardly my own, I said, “Jon-Michael Barthé.” His name didn’t sound right at all. They probably thought I was lying.
Later they wanted my name. I said, “Jesse.”
“Jesse what?”
“Jesse Durand.”
“Ain’t that a woman’s name?” asked an officer behind a desk.
“Sometimes,” I said.
They made me sign some papers. Then they let me go back home.
Once inside the apartment, I double-locked the door. I went to the window and spent hours looking up and down the street. Night came and swallowed up everything alive. Nothing moved, not even the subway below. I was alone. The rooms stirred empty. The emptiness gave off a chill. My eyes wouldn’t cry and wouldn’t close. I wanted to scream, but I had no air. I held myself in. I couldn’t stop trembling.
God, what had happened? Just yesterday we were standing together at the pier, marveling at the polluted Hudson. Then I had to get to class, dance class. I thought I was late. There was the girl I had danced with. Then the hours and hours I waited for Metro to come home. Suddenly voices filled the outer hallway. Rushing footsteps. Laughter. Banging on doors somewhere. My hands shook again and my stomach tied itself in knots. Where could I hide? But the voices went past my door and up to the last floor of the building. I was sweating. I had to talk to someone. Anyone. I called my parents long-distance but there was no answer. I called again and the line was busy. But what could I tell them? College buddy, roommate, lover dead? Not a chance. Then I fumbled through the telephone directory, found her name, number, and I dialed.
“Ruella, this is Jesse. From dance class, remember? We met yesterday. We danced. Remember?”
“Yes, yes, Jesse. But how did you get my number?” I tried to say something but couldn’t. “Jesse? You still there?”
“Listen, something terrible has happened. Metro, my friend. He’s been stabbed. He’s dead.” I couldn’t say anything more and she didn’t say any more. My breath caught in the phone. “I can’t stay here tonight,” I said. “Not alone.”
“You come right over, honey,” she said. “I’ve got plenty of room.”
I took only what I’d need for the night. Once there, I looked at her and she looked at me for a long time before I turned away and searched her windows. She didn’t ask any questions. I wanted to talk, to tell her everything. She said there was no rush. I wanted to say that boys named after their mothers are different, that it wasn’t for the money that they stabbed Metro; he had all his money on him when his body was found. It was for something else. When I tried to talk my lips started moving faster than the sounds, and I just cried, cried, cried.
Before the morgue’s cold darkness had sucked me in, I had seen the gashes like tracks all over Metro’s belly and chest. His open eyes were questions I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t say a word. The officer pulled the sheet all the way back and turned the body over where his ass had been slashed raw. I knew why he had been killed. I tried to scream but had no wind. I needed air. That’s when I must have hit the floor. I could still see those gashes. They opened everywhere, grooves of flesh and blood, lips slobbering with kisses.
Ruella put her arms around me. My stomach heaved. I bolted for the toilet and vomited until ther
e was nothing left of the bathroom or me. I woke up in her bed. From then on I called her Rooms.
After that first night she said I could stay longer if I needed to. I told her that guys like me are different.
“Then why did you call me?” she asked.
“Because you were there.”
“But why me, Jesse?”
“We danced, that’s all.”
The second night Rooms touched me by accident. I didn’t move. The chilly, October night filled the bed space between us. Then her hand crept to mine and held it, caressing and easing out the chill. Slowly, I relaxed but couldn’t help remembering the men who had first made me warm. Metro’s name came up raw on my tongue. It needed air, more air. “Metro,” I said aloud. I kept still.
“Jesse? You all right?”
Rooms drew closer to me. We held each other tight against the dark.
“Jesse? You all right?” Her voice, hovering in the chill.
Something was pricking my scalp. I pulled out one splinter after another, but they were over all of me now, and I scratched and pulled everywhere. Not wood from the warehouse floor or the rickety pier, these were glinting steel blades with my name on them. Faces I’d seen before inched from corners of the room, closing the gap between here and there, now and then. Mouths opened and sneered. Teeth got sharp. Tongues wagged and breath steamed up around me until I sank into the sheets. Now a boy’s voice. Then many voices. “Jesseeeee.” A steel blade getting close. Closer. “Jesse!”
“I won’t hurt you,” said Rooms.
Outside the bedroom window, police sirens hollered up and down the streets. Where the hell were they then?
I imagined how Metro came up from the IRT exit and entered our block from the corner of West 12th and Bank Street. He passed the shut newsstand. It was almost morning. Metallic edges of light cut back the night. Metro walked with the same aching sound I knew from my own scuffling feet. I could almost hear the brush of denim between his thighs, see the arch of his pelvis as he swayed arms and hips as if he owned the whole street. His eyes tried to focus on the walk; his head leaned carelessly to the side. As he neared our building he was not alone. Other shapes crawled into the street, filled it. Cigarette smoke trailed out from an alley, and the figures of boys appeared out of nowhere, riding spray-paint fumes, crackling marijuana seeds, and waves of stinking beer.
Four, five, maybe six teenagers. Maybe they were the ones. The same ones I had seen before on my way home from rehearsals. Even then their smell of a quick, cheap high had been toxic. One time they spotted me and yelled, first one, then another until I was trapped.
“Hey, nigger.”
“Yeah, you.”
“Naw, man, he ain’t no nigger. He a faggot.”
“Then he a black nigger faggot.”
They laughed. I walked faster, almost running, and reached my block in a cold sweat from pretending not to hear them. But I did hear them, and the sweat and trembling in my knees would not go away, not even when I reached the door and locked myself in.
Metro didn’t believe it was that bad. But what did he know? A white boy from Louisiana, New England prep schools and college. “Don’t worry, baby,” he said when I told him what had happened. He held my head and hands until I calmed down. “It’ll be all right.” And we made love slowly, deliberately, believing we were doing something right. Still, I should have known better than to take so much for granted, even in Greenwich Village where we lived. And I should have known better than to leave him alone by the pier in the condition he was in, just for a dance improvisation. He had a cold, wild look in his eyes. How could I tell how many pills he’d taken? He could have fought back. But then why hadn’t I fought back when those Italian kids started yelling, “He a black nigger faggot, yeah, he a faggot, a nigger, too,” and shouting and laughing so close they made acid out of every bit of safety I thought we had? Now their hate had eaten up everything.
I could still hear them, making each prove himself a man—“I ain’t no faggot. Not me, man”—and drawing blood. And when Metro left the black underground of trains and screeching wheels, when he reached for air in the thick ash of night, they spotted him like found money through the stinking grates of smoke and beer. I imagined how they followed his unsteady walk, his wavering vision, his fatigue. Curses like baseball bats swung out of their mouths. The first ones were on target: “There go a faggot.”
“Hey man, you a faggot?”
Metro kept walking. Like I did. Please keep walking. Please, Metro.
“I say that man call you a faggot. You a faggot?”
Metro said nothing. Did he even hear them? They came closer. The streets were empty. No witnesses, no help. And I was back home waiting for his knock that never came.
“Yeah, you a faggot all right. Ain’t he?”
“Yeah, he a faggot.”
And Metro walked faster, skipped into a run, but they caught him. Knives slipped out of their pants. Hands reached for him, caught him in a tunnel of angry metal. They told him to put his wallet back. “This ain’t no fucking robbery, man.” They knocked him down. Metro sprawled about wet and hurt, couldn’t pull himself up.
“Who stuck him?”
“Get up, faggot. We ain’t through that easy.”
“Look, he’s bleeding.”
“Who went ahead and stuck him before we all could stick it in? Who?”
They jostled him to his feet, feeling his ass.
“When can the rest of us stick it in? We all wanna fuck him, don’t we fellahs?”
“Yeah. When can we fuck him?”
And Metro was wet from the discharged knives. He stopped treading the ground. He swayed back like wood in water, his eyes stiff on the open zippers. The leader of them grinning, his mouth a crater spilling beer, said, “Now.”
“Why did you call me?” Rooms asked.
I said nothing.
“You think I’m gay, too?”
“No,” I said.
“You really loved him,” said Rooms.
“Yes.”
“That makes all the difference.” She held me with her eyes. They cut into me. “There’s something else, isn’t there? Something you haven’t told me.”
I tasted blood in my mouth. My head felt hot.
“I can wait,” she said.
I went to her window and looked out. A subway rumbled underground, then it was quiet. The lump high in my throat, about to spread all through me since yesterday, eased down for a moment. I went back to my apartment to get the rest of my things.
Ruella
NOW HOW MANY TIMES HAVE I TOLD MYSELF. “Ruella, girl, you really messed up.” And how many times will I say it over and over again. I’d gotten the words right, the perfect lines to my one-woman show. The same lines, the same action, and yet, there I went falling for someone impossible and beautiful and already attached. You’d have thought I would have learned my lesson. Men. I was not to blame, really. Well, not for all that happened. Not for the despair in it or the desperation. I should have known better. I’d been miserable before. But that time, that one time I thought I could heal fast. My scars usually don’t show, except for the tiny keloid behind my pierced ear. But that doesn’t mean I don’t remember losing anything. You can hurt on the inside without anybody knowing a thing. So what had I gotten myself into this time?
It was the grace of his feet on the hardwood floor, his toes touching mine. Right away I said to myself, “Ruella, girl, you better watch out.” You know what I mean? It was just a demi-plié, an improvisation, not even the real thing, the danced dance. Which is why I hate improvs. Whatever suspicions I had during the triplet sequence with Jesse were confirmed in the improvisation. Without choreography, you have to rely on your instincts or memory. That’s what gave me away. Jesse, too, I bet. Our instincts were magnets drawing us together. Left to ourselves, we dancers don’t skitter about, we prance and prowl like cats. Dangerous cats. There’s that sudden rush of movement, feeling, too, and it’s gone too quickly. An
d when I felt Jesse lift me in an arabesque I did not expect but needed, I relaxed in his arms. I trusted him because no one had touched me about my waist as he did except my brother Phillip. I wasn’t afraid. I knew he could take the weight. So Ruella, girl, why not twirl up your legs and let your heart follow one more time? It’s the same count and you remember the moves only too well. And-a one-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight!
What woman in her right mind would have expected Jesse or any man to call as soon as he did? Not me. I didn’t give him my vital statistics on purpose. He wouldn’t have heard me, anyway. By the time he got around to hinting he’d call, I had to run and catch my train. What girl wouldn’t? It was long after rush hour, but the trains were crowded just the same, especially going uptown. And a good thing, too. I could stop thinking about him and that dance we did. Improvisation, sure. But we were saying something. Look out, Alvin Ailey! And just wait till those Taylor Johnson auditions. Hmmm. Truth is, I was tired, too. It was a long, hot ride, even in October. The three flights up to my apartment hadn’t disappeared, and no elevator was installed overnight, so when I got in I just fell out. And you know what? I didn’t even get to my yoga before that man was back in my mind again, with my legs going limp and fluttery all at once like I’m about to go on stage. I had noticed his eyes first, those lashes longer than mine, and roast-beef thighs that bent so easily into grand plié, his tights wrinkling at the knee. Sure he was watching me watch him. I wasn’t a bit embarrassed. Then he started to sweat and the sweat greased that roast beef so slick, he looked delicious. I remembered my diet and looked the other way. I wasn’t going to get involved.
Next thing I knew we were doing triplets across the floor: One-two-three. One-two-three. He tapped my shoulder. Said his name was Jesse-two-three. “Oh,” I said, smiling, just to be cute and uninterested, as if I could lie right through these popeyes of mine with my teeth doing a kick-two-three out of my mouth, which is too big anyway. He took my hand and we were off across the floor-two-three. One-two-three. “It’s not only a woman’s name,” he said as we joined a new line going back across the floor-two-three. By then, I was really grinning, letting all my teeth show. And since we were keeping good time, I decided to be bold. I said, “All the Jesses I’ve ever known have been men.” He smiled again and danced closer-two-three. We headed back across the floor. “I’m Ruella McPhee,” I said, trying to be as graceful as he, especially on the lift-two-three when you turn out your knees and lift your stomach high into the chest-two-three. That’s when I started feeling something I shouldn’t even have been thinking about. I brushed back my short hair, which didn’t go anyplace, really, but the gesture made me feel rich.