Vanishing Rooms

by Melvin Dixon

  He caught up to me, his words as breathless as my stride. “I’m from the Wesman Herald. Can I talk to you for a minute?”

  I said nothing, but I could feel talk rumbling up from my belly.

  “Just one question, please. How did you all get inside?”

  No answer from me; my stomach now a tunnel at rush hour.

  “How many of you were really in there?”

  No comment. Blaring traffic jam inside me.

  My feet weighed heavier and the Nkrumah Center seemed miles away. He tried to keep pace. Others marching behind me were gaining upon us and crowding him out. He dropped his note pad. I looked away from him and kept marching, my stomach moving faster than my feet.

  “Dammit,” he said. Then his voice slipped back and was suddenly different. “How y’all expect people to listen to you if you don’t communicate?”

  Communicate? Y’all?

  From the byline of his article in the campus paper the next day, I learned his name was Jon-Michael Barthé. With an accent. Later, I saw him in the cafeteria line and told him my name. We talked. He was from the South, he said. And he had been to Paris the semester before. I hadn’t been anywhere, really. I invited him to my room for more talk. We said nothing about the takeover or about Malcolm X. We talked about ourselves and the stupid grin all over his face and mine. And for the first time he brought my trembling hands to his face. The smoothness of his skin unsettled me. Worried me.

  “That’s romantic,” said Rooms.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Seeing Metro from the classroom window. Becoming friends. Touching like that.”

  “It wasn’t easy,” I said. “The black students thought I had betrayed them. It was bad enough being a dancer, but a white boy’s friend? No way.”

  “Then there’s something more,” she said. “Something you’re not telling me.”

  I didn’t know what else to say.

  Metro and I finished college on a rainy spring day. Then we danced together on the sharp, metallic edges of Manhattan. Windows, steel, even the rooftops glittered in the sun, and our eyes were hungry for all we could see. Graduation day had released us from the confinement of Connecticut, the carpeted green of the campus quad, the terror of discovering what and who we were, the lonely aftermath. But we had finished college; the four years were gone. As we marched to receive our diplomas, cameras clicked from all sides, and it was then that I met Metro’s parents for the first time. “Smile, son,” his mother said as her camera reached for him. Metro stepped back and away from me, his smile tired and lazy from last night’s celebrations. His lips were chapped, his eyes wild and open with no bright luster calling me into them like before. He took a long step back from me, then came close. I said, “Well, we made it, man,” and he said, “Yeah,” and I hugged him. We waved our diplomas at the cameras snapping from his folks and mine. I rolled my parchment and hit him with it, and he hit me. We tussled and danced in our gowns, hollering ourselves silly. I bowed to him. He pulled wide the edges of his sleeves and curtsied. There was a lot our families didn’t know about us.

  His parents made him return to Louisiana with them for a couple of weeks. I went ahead and moved to Manhattan. I waited for him. When he joined me, he looked scared and different. I’ll never know what happened down there. But he did say how he remembered something in his growing up. Once Metro had gone along when his mother drove their maid Bertha home, which was far out in the country. I don’t know how old he was then, but he remembered smelling woodsmoke and tobacco everywhere. When their car pulled into Bertha’s yard, one of her sons ran up to look in at Metro and his mother. His name was Otis, Bertha said, and the boys shook hands. On the ride back home, Metro told me, he kept smelling woodsmoke and tobacco. And when his mother wasn’t looking, he sniffed, then tasted, where Otis’s hand had touched his.

  He joined me in Manhattan and began work. He had the night shift at the Daily News and started out editing press releases and drafting celebrity obituaries in advance. I took as many dance classes as I could. I worked off and on with a new choreographer who was experimenting with geometrical shapes, triangles and squares formed from human bodies in motion. But most of the time I was darting from one technique class to another, often without a moment to change out of the tights under my jeans. Metro slept during the day or freelanced articles for art magazines. We’d make love in the late afternoon before he went to work. By then I’d be supple from the day’s exercises. He’d open my fist and smell the palm of my hand. Sometimes we made love in the early morning when the city night was just beginning to dissolve. I’d say things to him like, “Metro bringing me into the sunlight. Metro, my underground man.” And he’d say, “Take it, baby. Take it all.”

  The night work was slowly wearing him down. He was getting pale, growing silent and distracted when we were together. His parents kept after him to come back South. He started taking pills, uppers to keep him going, downers to help him relax. He was staying out later than his work required. I knew he went cruising sometimes and was sleeping around. So was I, now and then. But he started wanting more than I could give. One day, one night, rather, he called me from a phone booth on West Street. When I joined him there, I found him haggard, thin, and with puffy, sleepless eyes. He led me to a warehouse along the pier that had long ago been abandoned.

  “Don’t say anything, Jesse. Just follow me.” His voice had changed.

  He led me to a door and inside where it was dark and reeking of beer and marijuana. Floorboards poked up here and there, and the smell of the river was strong. There was another room above this one, and we climbed a flight of rickety stairs.

  “You like it?”

  “What kind of place is this anyway, Metro? What are we doing here?”

  “A friend from work told me about it.”

  “But this place stinks,” I said. “It’s dangerous. You can’t even see anyone.” And I couldn’t see anyone, but I heard footsteps and whispers, saw glowing cigarette butts, the fast flame of a match. Far from us and over part of the river was a hole in the ceiling, then the roof. The whole place looked like it could collapse in a minute.

  “People come here,” Metro said, “to play.”

  “I don’t want anything to do with this. Let’s get out of here.” I moved to leave but couldn’t find the stairs, and when I did, I didn’t trust them to hold me.

  “Jesse, please. Look, things go on here. All the time.” Metro pulled me further inside. Shadows moved about. A beer can dropped and spilled. Floorboards creaked. A chill crawled into my back.

  “Look Metro, we have our own place. You and me, right?”

  He said nothing.

  “What’s gotten into you?” I asked.

  Metro looked away from me, disappointed. Then his eyes brightened. He started to laugh. “Don’t you see? All this is part of it, what we came to New York for. The streets, the sweat, beer and cigarettes. And here? You’d walk in, anybody would walk in, hands hooked in the belt, your jeans torn just so around the crotch. You’d lean against the wood, and I’d find you, smell you waiting there. I’d kneel just so, and you’d talk dirty to me.” He laughed again and his voice chilled me. I couldn’t tell if he was serious or not, and that scared me all the more.

  “I don’t like this,” I said. “Not at all.” I left him standing there and waited for him downstairs and outside. To my right was another pier, but without a warehouse, just row after row of blackened beams. And there were people, a few men in jeans, some drag queens. Some had on the slightest of clothes, some were bare-chested, booted, jeans torn through. But I was the one who felt empty, filling up with loss. I couldn’t help thinking how in just a short time the city had separated Metro and me. First by the hours of our work, our lovemaking when everyone else was taking the morning subway. Then by the things we saw each day: I had lofts and mirrors and leotards and dance barres bending me one-two-three, one-two-three, and opening my thighs in deep plies. Metro had the police files, the city morgue
, night court, three-alarm fires, subway muggings, and obituaries. The lines of his face were becoming tracks of frayed nerves and sleepless nights, even after making love, and we were withdrawing to separate sides of the bed, the tiny bedroom, the three-room apartment, and finally the street.

  He asked me to meet him there once again after work. It was early, early morning. The place was still dark as if morning had changed its mind or had merely taken flight at what it saw. I was scared. When I found Metro and held him close, away from the loose beams and crumbling floorboards, I didn’t suspect it would be the last time I’d see him alive. I can still feel the splinters in my skin.

  “That’s still not all,” said Rooms, watching me more closely than before.

  “What do you mean?” I tried to look away. Her eyes found mine. We watched each other cautiously, then with care.

  “You made it to class all right,” she said. “And we danced. Remember?”

  “Yes, we danced.”

  The police said they were investigating the attack. They had a few leads. “It wasn’t just an attack,” I argued. “It was murder.” They had notified Metro’s family who had his body shipped to Louisiana. I didn’t go to the funeral. I stayed inside where I was. The night they buried him, I took the #1 train downtown and walked to the pier. I was too afraid and ashamed to go further. And he was all I could think about.

  Metro wasn’t even his real name. I just called him that.

  Now the emptiness in my chest whistled with his name and mine. But what about Rooms?

  Rooms, where I tried to lose myself.

  I told her I know how it feels to have a man inside you. I know how to fuck and to be fucked, how the pain and the release can make you dance in place. Hop-step and dip. My name is Jesse. My mother’s name. See how easily I open? See how deep the cuts run? I’ve had a man from the inside, under the skin, deep, deep inside me.

  “Why are you telling me this, Jesse?”

  “Because I have to, I don’t know.”

  She said she liked it when I called her Rooms. We exercised and danced together until our sweat ran in streams on the floor of her apartment. With Rooms I found other spaces to touch, other windows to look from. But there was one locked door. Metro had the key, and he was dead.

  “Why did you come to me in the first place, Jesse, if you felt so sure about Metro? About yourself?”

  “I had to know.”

  “Know what?”

  “If they took everything from me when they killed him.”

  “You’re very strong there, and beautiful.”

  “I mean inside, Rooms. My feelings inside.”

  “You’ll find different feelings, maybe.”

  “You think so?”

  “Here,” she said, stretching her thighs. “Here.”

  Ruella

  WELL, I THOUGHT, WHY NOT COME RIGHT OUT and let him know you’re interested? There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s like planting a seed or warming up before a dance. But that’s not all I said. I told him my real name, Ruella McPhee, and he still called me Rooms. Don’t ask me why. I was a place to come to, fine, I accepted that. But English isn’t the only language I know. How else could I pretend to be a foreigner and get such attentive customer service in those Fifth Avenue shops on payday? Cardinal High was good for something practical besides typing class. So I told Jesse, “Rue is the French word for ‘street.’ That means I’m going somewhere.” Then he said something smart like, “Metro runs underground, gets under the skin, too.”

  “I wouldn’t know about that,” I said, with my eyes arched.

  That made him blush.

  “And ella is Spanish for ‘she.’ So I’m a woman going somewhere. Bet you can’t even say it, huh? Eh-yah.”

  “Fast travel,” he said. “Caroom-boom-clack, caroom-boom-clack.”

  “Not on my train, pretty poppa,” I hollered. “I need me an easy rider.”

  That shut him up, but after a minute he grinned like he’d caught me in my own mess. “Then we’ll make it nice and easy.”

  “Clickety-clack?” I asked.

  “Eh-yah.”

  Chile, my legs like to fall out from under me. But I didn’t tell him that.

  Truth is, I’m not a pretty woman. Not really. People say I’m pretty when I smile, so I keep smiling, even grin to give my teeth some air. So I didn’t expect Jesse to call. I never had long, even hair. The kind you pet or sing verses to while combing it out. I’m not that tall either. Medium. Well, short to medium. It took me five years of tap dance and modern to get my leg muscles strong enough for ballet. Then I thought I’d die before getting my first pair of toe shoes, those pink satin ones with the roll of rabbit fur to wrap around the toes and those long shiny ribbons reaching halfway up the calf. Then I was on my way. Going somewhere, if only to another dance class. Jesse and I, being very colored and almost late, wound up as partners.

  That’s how we met. We danced. Triplets one-two-three across the floor, and a long, improvised movement to Nina Simone’s heavy voice. I hadn’t seen Jesse before, so how was I to know we were more alike than either of us wanted to admit. Besides, where would it lead? I’ve known men like him before, who were interested only in their bed or mine. So we just danced, Jesse and I. Nothing more. I had the feeling we’d see each other again, maybe become friends. And when he needed a place to stay, how was I to know he’d remind me of my older brother Phillip, who used to hold my hand while Mama raked the comb through my knotty hair and made me holler. And when I had to sec the skin doctor for the burning rash on my behind, he’d hold me close and say with the tenderness of God, “Hold on, Lil’ Sis. Everything’s gonna be all right.” The only person I could believe in through all those salves and creams and itch was my brother Phillip. And here comes Jesse pulling me across the studio floor on a leap-two-three, turn-two-three, relevé, and down.

  Jesse must have thought about himself in that improvisation. Perhaps about Metro, too, who was alive then. Alive in Jesse like Jesse made Phillip alive in me. Maybe that’s why Jesse needed to stay with me. And when it turned out to be longer than either of us expected, I didn’t mind. I mean, I wasn’t going to put him out after all he’d been through. He made my knees weak, he was so handsome and alone. But what can a dancer do with weak knees except to keep on dancing?

  Which is what I did with Phillip when Mama braided my hair into coils of headache or raked my scalp until I thought I’d bleed, or when I couldn’t help scratching the rash on my behind only to tear away the skin and bleed for real that time. I wasn’t even having periods yet, but I was wearing all kinds of padded underwear and drinking goat’s milk to heal my skin. All I wanted from Phillip was his tenderness, so that being a sickly colored girl wouldn’t seem like the end of the world. I wasn’t asking anything from Jesse, either. So when he called me, late as it was, I figured he could come right over. I had plenty of room. I wasn’t asking for anything. For once, I could give something. We’d work on that dance, get ready for auditions, and-a one-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight.

  Wouldn’t you know it’d be more complicated than that. Two days after Jesse’s coming to stay with me, I came home to the smell of Lysol disinfectant and Ajax with ammonia. The apartment was as clean as a dime, and there was Jesse peeling potatoes at the sink, the dishes stacked up neat, the counter scrubbed to a shine, and the man had my apron on!

  “I didn’t expect you to clean the kitchen,” I said.

  “It’s the least I could do. You’re good enough to let me stay here.”

  “But Jesse,” I said, looking around the kitchen, at the sunlight streaking through the rooms. “It’s not only the kitchen, it’s the whole place. You cleaned it all?”

  “You’ve seen the bedroom?”

  “Newspapers put away. Rug vacuumed. Clothes in the hamper. Even my dance tights folded neat. Do you do windows?” We both laughed.

  “Just trying to be helpful.”

  “Your apartment must have been spotless,” I said.
/>   “I tried to keep it clean.”

  “Bet you didn’t even have roaches, huh?”

  “Squashed every one I saw. Twice I had the place exterminated myself when the landlord refused to do it.”

  “The whole building?”

  “You kidding? Just our place.”

  “Two rooms?”

  “Three.”

  “Me? I can live with roaches. They were here before I came, and they’ll be here long after I’m gone.”

  “You have a nice place,” said Jesse.

  “You’ve made it nicer.”

  “I had something to work with. You coming to dance class? You ready for stretches, lunch?”

  “Then off to the studio?”

  “Sure.”

  “You’re something else, Jesse.”

  I sat on the floor with my legs spread out and open, my tights lengthening to my flexed toes. Jesse sat opposite me. The soles of our feet pressed together. Tension increased. Every muscle of thigh, calf, ankle, and foot held firm. We gripped hands and leaned as far back as we could to stretch the back. Jesse pulled me forward. I pulled him forward. We pulled in a circle and pulled again until our torsos reached flat against the floor. We were both breathing heavily as if our bodies didn’t quite match, and all the pulling and stretching was trying in vain to fit us together. J used to do this exercise with a girl my size. We had the same spread. With Jesse it was different. My pelvis and thighs stretched wider than before. The muscle tension in our swaying, stretching, pulling, give-and-take felt electric. Then I noticed the bulge in his tights. It grew larger into a fat ball he tried to hide but couldn’t. How different men are! The same exercises don’t apply. You have to consider differences in height, pelvis, groin. Then the grown-up Phillip came back to my mind in his dance of drugs, different from Jesse’s stretches or his cleaning the kitchen, bedroom, and bath, or how I stretched close to the ground, pulling back and forth and not lifting my thighs, which was a way of hiding my freckled ass when I was a kid or toe-tapping the air above a man’s pumping back now that I’m grown.