Original Love

by J. J. Murray

  “Are you going to share that?”

  I freeze and turn slowly to see Ebony standing in the shadows in front of the Captain’s door. I look down at my penis dangling out of the front of my boxers and put the ice-cold bottle over the opening.

  “Ebony?”

  She moves closer, wearing only a white T-shirt and, as far as I can tell, nothing else. “I’m not talking about the Asti, Peter.” She looks down at the bottle. “Doesn’t that hurt?”

  “Um, it doesn’t feel too good.” Oh God, I’m hyperventilating! Why does my body pick this time to forget how to breathe?

  She laughs. “Do you, um, do you have a girlfriend, sailor?” She steps closer, her nipples taut against her shirt.

  “No.”

  She licks her lower lip. “Are you married?”

  I look down at her pearl-chipped toes. “No.”

  “Any kids?” She reaches out a hand, placing it on my chest.

  Oh, God. Her touch, that electric touch. “Just one. A daughter.”

  “Is she as pretty as me?”

  “No.”

  “Liar.” She moves her hand down my chest to the bottle. “May I have a drink?”

  “S-sure.”

  She lifts the bottle to her lips and drinks deeply, her eyes never leaving mine.

  “I—I thought you were preparing for a show.”

  She sets the bottle in the sink and reaches her arms around my neck. “I am.” She kisses my neck. “Welcome to the show.” She kisses my chin. “I hope you don’t mind if, um, you’re part of the show, too.”

  “Ebony, I—”

  She stands on tiptoes and kisses my lips. “Not tonight.” She takes my hand. “I don’t want to talk tonight.” She cocks her head towards the bottle. “I don’t think we’ll need that, but bring it just in case.”

  I pick up the bottle and take a long swig.

  Then she shuts the refrigerator door, darkness bathing the galley. “Hold on to me, Peter.”

  I slide my hand around her stomach, and it’s soft and firm. God, it’s like she hasn’t changed in twenty years! She lifts her shirt and places my hand on her smooth skin, my fingers tickling her gumdrop belly button.

  She leads me into the Captain’s berth, a single votive candle flickering from its holder on a desk crammed with nautical charts and map books. She takes the bottle and drinks again, the sparkling wine dribbling down her chin to her shirt. She hands the bottle to me.

  “Finish it,” she says.

  I gulp the rest while she peels off her shirt and lies on the Captain’s bed, both arms reaching out to me.

  “You haven’t aged a day,” I say with a trembling voice.

  She shakes her head. “Shh. We’ll talk tomorrow. Come to me, Peter.”

  I drop the bottle behind me and slide out of my boxers. “It’s been a long time,” I whisper as I ease myself on top of her, her skin hot, burning. “I might, um, miss.”

  She welcomes me inside her and sighs. “I’ve been waiting twenty years.” Tears well up in her eyes. “Twenty years I’ve been faithful to you, Peter. You’re my one and only love.”

  Tears spill out of my eyes. “You waited—”

  She stops my word with a long, slow kiss. “Just don’t let me go this time.”

  “I won’t. I promise.”

  14

  I wake before Ebony does, her soft breath warm on my chest, and listen to the rain tapping on the roof of the cabin. And for some reason, my back doesn’t ache at all, and it usually aches like crazy whenever it rains. Sexual healing, indeed. The Argo rocks us, but I’m too wired to sleep, despite the fierceness of our lovemaking. I stroke her hair, a shiny auburn, and slide a finger around her earlobe, and as I pull her closer, I can’t help feeling so sad.

  We could have been waking up every morning like this for the last twenty years.

  She stirs and opens one sleepy eye. “Hi.”

  “Hi.”

  She slips her hand to my face and pulls on a few of the longer hairs on my chin. “I almost don’t recognize you. Where are your freckles?”

  “I still have them.”

  She closes her eyes and hugs me close. “Good.”

  “Remember the last time we were on this boat?”

  She opens her eyes. “Yeah.”

  I half expect to hear the Captain’s bones rattling. “I intend to replace the memory of that night with last night.”

  “Me, too.” She yawns, pushes off my chest, and sits, holding the sheet in front of her. “What do you have to eat besides what I brought?”

  “Nothing. Sorry.”

  “Well, bring it on anyway. I’m hungry.”

  We polish off a box of Chicken in a Biskit and a can of Easy Cheese in less than ten minutes. We have each exceeded our saturated fat allowance for the rest of the month. I take my time eating because I’m not sure how our first real conversation in twenty years should go. Will she be angry and hurt? Probably. How angry and hurt she’ll be is the question.

  She pulls on her T-shirt and sits on top of the Captain’s desk, her feet making circles in the air. “It’s about time you came home, sailor.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And I meant what I said about waiting for you. I’ve been celibate since nineteen eighty-one. That has to be some sort of world record.”

  “You didn’t have to wait for me, Ebony.”

  She peeks through a crack in the blinds. “I know I didn’t. And it wasn’t like I didn’t get any attention. I thought that once I had Destiny, the boys would stay away.”

  “They didn’t?”

  “No. First there was Simon—”

  No way! “Simon Lloyd?”

  She nods. “He dumped what’s-her-name in a flash once Mama told him you weren’t coming back. We went out a couple times, but…” She shrugs. “He was Simon, tall, goofy, Simon. He wasn’t you. I hear he’s playing that bass of his at some jazz club in Brooklyn.” She stares at me. “And you’re not exactly the you I remember, but you still have those freckles.”

  “Not as many as back then.”

  “True.” She pulls her legs up onto the top of the desk and slides her shirt down to her feet. “Then there was Mickey. Remember Mickey Mather?”

  “You went out with Mickey?” She was going through all my friends!

  “Well, we didn’t exactly go out. We just hung out together, you know, played some ball, and went on walks. He was probably my best friend for a while until he moved away. He writes me every now and then. He has four boys, and every one of them has his round head.” She groans.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m sore,” she says, wincing.

  “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be. I’m out of practice.” She drops her eyes and bites her lower lip. God, she’s a goddess when she’s shy like that. “We’re, um, we’re going to be doing a lot of practicing, aren’t we?”

  I nod. “Yes, Ebony. For the rest of our lives.”

  She looks up. “Don’t be thinking that far ahead just yet, okay? I need to sort a few things out, and it might take me some time.”

  I want to ask “How much time will you need?” but I’m afraid of the answer. She’s calm so far, much calmer than I would be in her position. “What do you need sorted out?”

  “Twenty years of questions I’ve had.”

  That’s not a “few things.” My next question could open Pandora’s box. “What kinds of questions?”

  Her eyebrows twitch, and her pupils turn into two little brown dots. Here it comes. “Well, for one, why did you marry…her…instead of me?”

  Boom. I look away from her eyes.

  “Why, Peter? She was nothing like me.”

  Edie, whiter than an albino with dandruff, shrieks through my head on her skinny broom. “I’ve been thinking a lot about why I married, um, Edie,” I stammer. “You see…I thought I had lost you. Forever.”

  “I was right here the whole time, Peter.”

  “But I didn’t know that, Ebony.�
�

  She stands and starts pacing. “I know, but you could have come back anyway, right? You could have made up with your daddy, come home to me and your daughter where you belonged, and I wouldn’t have had to wait twenty years to be happy.”

  I roll out of the bed to hold her. “Ebony, I’m sorry.”

  She puts out two hands and steps back. “No, don’t. Not yet.”

  I drop my arms. Be patient, will you? I scream in my head. I turn, pull on my boxers, and sit on the edge of the bed.

  Her pacing begins again. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to raise a child by yourself?”

  “No, but at least you had your mama and Aunt Wee Wee to help you.”

  “And later your daddy, too, but when it came down to it, it was just me.” She bites her lip. “Just me,” she whispers. “I needed you, Peter, I really did. I mean, I got stares and questions from people who thought I was babysitting my own daughter. You don’t know how that feels, and you don’t want to know what people said after I told them that Destiny was my daughter.”

  “What did they say?”

  “Most just said ‘Oh’ and kept on walking. One woman even said, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry.’ Can you believe that? Like it was awful for me to have a light-skinned daughter. If you were there, no one would have had to say anything so cold to me.”

  “Yeah.” Maybe. Some people are just cruel because they can be.

  “I had to change her, feed her, clothe her, bathe her, burp her, and read bedtime stories to her. I had to stay up all night when she had a fever, had to take her to all those doctor’s and dentist’s appointments, had to hold her whenever she was scared of the dark. Just me.”

  “You’ve done an amazing job. Destiny is…Destiny is a dream come true.”

  Ebony smiles. “You really don’t know your daughter that well, Peter. That child can be a nightmare.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, she was a good baby, I’ll give her that. But because she was so cute, we spoiled her. Rotten. I had to beat her with my wet hand many times.”

  Ebony beat my daughter? “You…beat her?”

  “Someone had to.” Her eyes soften. “I didn’t beat her, Peter, not like you were beaten. I spanked her, like the Bible says. ‘Spare the rod, spoil the child,’ right?”

  I must have been the least spoiled child on earth. “But with a wet hand?”

  “It stings more.”

  “You or her?”

  She laughs. “Her and me both.”

  “Oh.”

  “Mama never had any trouble with Destiny.”

  I believe it.

  “Mama never had to count past two. Me?” She rolls her eyes. “I had to say two, two and a half, two and three-quarters, two and seven-eighths…”

  I smile. That’s probably the way I would have handled Destiny, too.

  “She was sweet to everybody in daycare, too, but when we got into the car at the end of the day, that child went off, saying, ‘Gimme a drink, Mama!’ and ‘Take me home now, Mama!’” She pauses to look away. “I had to pull over to the side of the road just to cry sometimes.”

  “You did?”

  She nods. “She even told the daycare people that I beat her, and they confronted me. Imagine being confronted by a bunch of white ladies, Peter, asking if you beat what they see as a white child. I told them, politely, that I spanked my child, that my religion allows it. And when I got home that night, I just couldn’t spank her anymore.” She wipes away a tear.

  “Ebony, I’m, I’m so—”

  “I know, I know.” She sighs and starts to pace again, fluttering a hand in the air. “When that child started school, we had to take her for her shots. And there isn’t one nurse at Huntington Hospital that your daughter hasn’t bitten, kicked, or hit. It took four of us to hold her down for any of her shots. And giving medicine at home was next to impossible. She’d spit it out on me or keep her mouth closed. She even bit my fingers a couple times and batted away the spoon. Then Mama told me about the cure.”

  “You mixed it in with her food.”

  Ebony rolls her eyes. “Destiny isn’t a dog, Peter…though I did try that.” She giggles. “It didn’t work. She has your nose, remember? She could smell the medicine no matter how thoroughly I mixed it in. No, I got an extra large, long-sleeved shirt and put her in it. Then I tied her arms together tight like a straitjacket, sat on her legs, pinched her nose till she opened her mouth, and used a medicine dropper to squirt it down her throat. The child was born for drama, so I gave her some. I only had to do it a few times. Like me, Destiny doesn’t like to be restrained like that.”

  I’m relieved. This was beginning to sound like Mommie Dearest. “Was she, uh, was she a good student?”

  “She got straight A’s from all her male teachers, because your child was a daddy’s girl without a daddy, and she barely passed the rest. I used to catch her cutting up her brand-new school clothes, just cutting long slits in her pants. She told me, ‘They’re the style, Mama,’ but I know it was just to get her male teachers’ attention. Destiny has only been out on two dates her entire life, and both boys were three or four years older than her, and both boys were white.”

  I guess I should feel honored, but Destiny sounds so lonely. “Did you, um, did you ever get her any counseling? I saw similar behavior where I taught, and—”

  “‘Similar behavior?’” She laughs and shakes her head. “I doubt it, Peter. When that child was mad at me—and she seemed to be mad from the time your daddy died all the way through high school—when she was mad at me, she’d tie string to my bedroom doorknob and tie the other end to the doorknob on the hall closet. I couldn’t get out, Peter. I couldn’t get out of my room.” She flutters her eyelids. “I always kept a long bread knife in my room after that first time, just in case.” She shakes her head. “No, I didn’t get counseling for her, because all she really needed was a father.”

  I look at my feet. “Yeah.”

  She nods. “But because you weren’t around, I often had to take drastic measures to keep her in line. My ultimate punishment was to take that child’s TV away.” She shudders. “And that brought that chick from The Exorcist right up into my house when I did that. Check out Destiny’s door. It still has the dents in it from when she threw her nightstand against it.” She closes her eyes. “But even that didn’t work every time, because she was still reading the TV Guide. She used to read it cover to cover in front of me, and she even memorized who played what on each show. When I threatened to cancel my subscription, though, she straightened out in a hurry.” She shakes her head and sighs. “And now it’s Soap Opera Digest. At least she’s reading something.”

  I want to laugh, but I had better not. My daughter has just been researching her career for a couple years. “So she’s a natural actress.”

  “There isn’t anything natural about memorizing the TV Guide.”

  “No, I guess not.” Though it would help her on the crossword puzzle in the back.

  We regard each other in silence for a while, making eyes like we used to when we were kids. She is being so calm! Maybe she’s just being calm before the storm. “Uh, Ebony, if I were you, I don’t know if I would be so, um, happy about all this.”

  “You think I’m happy?”

  “Well, you aren’t throwing things at me.”

  “Not yet,” she says with a smile, so I know she doesn’t mean it. “Peter, I’ve been hoping for this moment for so long, and now it’s here. I can’t be anything but happy about it.”

  “But you were depressed for a while, weren’t you?”

  She looks at my feet. “Yeah. That was a pretty crummy time. I felt so lost. I was waiting for you to run back to me after you and she separated.” She winces. “And you didn’t.”

  “Edie dragged out the divorce to punish me.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “How did you know?”

  She starts to drift across the floor. “At first it was a feeling. My heart ached for no appa
rent reason, and trust me, that’s a spooky thing to have happen to you. I thought I was having heart trouble and even saw a doctor, but nothing was wrong, and I was healthy as a horse. But my heart still hurt, so I made a phone call and found out. I’d rather not say who I talked to so you don’t think I was stalking you.”

  Who would she have called? Not many people knew. My school? No, I didn’t tell anyone there. The Meltons? No, they wouldn’t have advertised that. It would have been bad for their image. That only leaves—

  Oh, my God! “You talked to Edie.”

  “Yeah. It didn’t go over very well.”

  It wouldn’t have. And that one phone call might have prolonged our divorce even longer, but I don’t want to bring that up. I can’t despise Edie any more than I already do, and I don’t want to blame Ebony for any of it.

  “I’m so sorry, Ebony. Really. And all I can do is say ‘I’m sorry.’” But I have a feeling that if I said “I’m sorry” a million times, it still wouldn’t fix twenty years of a “few things.”

  She takes a few deep breaths. “I know you didn’t know you had a child, and I know Mama kept all of your letters from me, but couldn’t you have come home, at least to see your daddy before he died? All you had to do was come for a visit on a weekend, Peter. That’s all. You would have seen your daughter out on this boat, you would have made up with your daddy, and we could have been together so much sooner.”

  Oh, God, now my heart aches. “I’ll never leave you again,” I say as tears fall into my lap.

  She crouches in front of me and brushes a tear away. “You better not. Otherwise I won’t get any compensation for the last twenty years.”

  I look up. “Compensation?”

  She nods.

  “You mean, child support?” That has to add up to…Gulp. A lot of money I don’t have and may never get!

  She leans her forehead against mine. “Something like that.” She wipes away another tear. “Remember that book we read in Miss Thurston’s class?”

  Miss Thurston: varicose veins, high heels…Simpson…eighth grade. “Didn’t we read the Odyssey?”