Sidarra stopped chewing her food and looked up. “What do you mean? Where’s she going?”
“She’s going to Japan on business. She can’t say when her project will end there. She probably won’t be back until the summer at least.” His face was resolute, but not sad, as if he was were waiting to take his cue from Sidarra.
“Well, um, how do you feel about it?”
Griff looked at Sidarra and measured his words. “I’m pretty damn cool with it, Sid. I’ve never been so relieved. I’m not gonna sit here and say that everything happens for a reason, but sometimes they do.”
Suddenly her body felt like it had to be someplace else, and she was taking him with her. “Please let me pay,” she said, waving down the fanatical waiter.
His face looked game. “Okay, but I had something else I wanted to tell you.”
“Let it wait,” she advised, hurrying them into their coats. And after paying, they walked out into the crisp chill of the late afternoon street.
They walked the downtown sidewalks arm in arm and slow, a pace so slow they sometimes wobbled. The two glasses of wine each drank helped. Giggles came easy. But their long strides matched, and their hips touched as they bumped paths again and again. When they were ready to resume speaking, Griff had forgotten what he wanted to tell Sidarra. So they asked about each other’s favorite secret destination: Paris, France, she said; anywhere in Belize, he said. And Sidarra told him about the charter school she was thinking about starting, leaving the Board of Miseducation to go back to teaching. They laughed at the irony of the chancellor’s position being taken over by a strong black woman from outside the men’s club of usual suspects. Strange that after waiting a dozen or more years for something like that, Sidarra might leave it as soon as it happened.
Yet it wasn’t the talk anymore that mattered, but the temptation of an alley. The icy river, not far off, whispered privacy to them and they walked west. As they passed their reflections in Tribeca plate glass, navigated a patch of cobblestone, onstage beneath streetlamps, the city kept increasing the delight of finding themselves arm in arm at last with no meeting or pool game to go to.
They never made it to the river because a brick wall stopped them cold. “I gotta ask you something I never wanted to stoop to,” Griff said. Sidarra nodded. “How have you managed to be as breathtaking and thoughtful and sexy all these years and be without a man who would stand beside you and be done?”
“Be done?” she asked, loving the hell out of Griff’s wine-induced syntax.
“Yes,” he said into her eyes. “Be done looking anywhere else, finished with himself as a man alone and ready to be a partner with an equal, done with all the bullshit that comes before, when a guy’s not sure, and just get on with the honor of trying to be the equal to you. How’d you manage to miss that guy?”
“Well,” she laughed, and closed her arm tighter around his and took a step. “First I was stupid for a long time. I kicked a lot of men to the curb on general principle. I was stupid and unnecessarily mean. Then I became sad and fat, then just chubby and sad. After that I went on to being kind of skinny sad, and, as Mr. Harrison used to say, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.” They both laughed and bent a little this way and that, but the alley wall behind her remained unmoved. “There is a man, though,” Sidarra finally admitted.
“Yeah?”
“His name is Michael. He’s a bit older. He cares about me a lot. I care about him too. He’s a man that should have been a friend, Griff, in a world that offered too little else to me. I mean, we all have needs. I’ve never been in love with him; he knows that. But we’ve done the best we could over a couple of years now.”
Griff turned and leaned into the old brick of the Tribeca alley. “You’ve been a little lonely, huh?”
“But not today, baby.”
And that’s when they knew to lean into each other’s soft, ready lips and kiss. He held her head, she palmed his neck, and their coats opened to let each other’s warm bodies closer for a great long kiss against the wall. They licked and tasted the delicacy of each other’s gums and tongues and teeth. It was the first best kiss of adolescence again, perfected by decades of experience. It was what you couldn’t know how to feel then finally happening now. And every time words, suggestions, or declarations came to each of their minds to say, they kept kissing. In time there was no wonder. It was clear what to do next.
Making love didn’t need to be like her fantasy to be better than the dream, because it was both of their hopes pent up. It was her red room with the pillows and the shrine, not a pool table in a lounge. It was a weekday afternoon, not a forbidden late night. It was A1 Green singing playfully of love, not Marvin Gaye losing their minds. On the drive to Harlem, they held hands and grooved fingers. When they reached her home, they marched up the stairs with singular purpose, giggling, grabbing, and pulling each other upward by the hand. Sidarra was his simple goddess, the actual queen of his senses, and he swarmed her body with his hands, licking and teething her clothes off of her. The foreplay was all stumble, a mixed-up process of getting undressed with can’t-wait passion and wet pressure points. As she nibbled his neck, Griff grew so hard, his penis much thicker and more marvelous in her hand than in her dream. Sidarra’s curvaceous body rolled over and under him like an insistent tide. He lifted her into his arms and hugged her against his naked body in waves, giggling long kisses into her mouth while looking for the right place to lay her down again. He wandered over her magnificence in search of thresholds to cross. Finally he lowered her gently down onto the sofa and inhaled at the sight of beautiful lingerie she had intended for no one but herself.
“So this is what you look like the other days of the week?”
“I often look like this on Tuesdays, but you never asked to see.”
He grinned mischievously. “May I?” he asked, and bent low over her pelvis.
“Do, baby. Do what you feel.”
Griff lifted her lower back to him from beneath and electrified her swollen vagina with his mouth. She moaned over the sounds of “You Ought to Be with Me.” Griff washed her and soaked her and bedeviled her with slow determination until they were sticky and hysterical, and she reached to pull him inside of her. Their eyes open and locked on each other, the deep meeting of their flesh overcame their breath. They held the gaze from less than an inch away as their lips slid across each other’s, as she widened and as he grew. They rolled against the hilt back and forth again and again in long, then tight, then long, then harder strokes, until their flesh was fairly splashing, their mouths wide open for air, legs shaking and rocking to the frenzy of one full-body scream. Sidarra had just come a second time when Griff let go all his might within her. And they were spent.
Sidarra absorbed Griff’s loving weight atop her body and listened to new songs play. Her eyes scanned the ceiling and traced the last lines of sunrays seeking the red walls. She held his butt cheeks until they stopped trembling against her. They lay filled up and tired. The truth felt like love, and she didn’t dare live to see this truth reduced little by little to rumor someday. Her body decided to never let this man go. Her fingernails gently crisscrossed the muscles on his back, her eyes stuck on heaven. She refused to calculate. She didn’t care to reason. Aunt Chickie was plain wrong about love, but still, for Sidarra, to hear Griff say something now would mean the devastating power of simultaneous orgasms was no accident. She couldn’t wait to know.
She didn’t have to. As if he anticipated her question, Griff pulled his arms up so he could look back into her eyes, grind his torso a touch deeper inside her, and lay a kiss on the moist tip of her noise. “I want you to be clear about something, Sidarra,” he declared just above her face. “It’s what I meant to tell you when you interrupted me to leave Odeon.”
What? her eyes said.
“I love you. I’ve loved you for a long time. That may not sit right with you. I’m not playing the angles here, though I know there are some. Feel that?”
Grif
f nudged his penis slightly inside her walls. It was still as hard as if he had never come. “I like that,” she said. “What is that?”
“My body backing up my words.”
“Okay,” she purred, and searched for her reflection in his eyes. “Okay, but tell me one more time.”
GRIFF STAYED INTO THE EARLY EVENING with Sidarra upstairs on the third floor, walking naked together around the space and lounging to music in each other’s arms. Raquel had lacrosse practice—Sidarra’s concession to the skiing episode—and Aunt Chickie remained on the ground floor doing whatever she did down there. Sidarra lay back freely on a corner of the sofa and watched Griff wander across the things in the room. He stopped at her work area and took a step up the short platform.
“Koob wasn’t kidding,” he said, pointing to the computer. “You never use your computer, do you?”
Sidarra closed her legs as if she were a bit embarrassed. “Not often. I mean, I use it to keep track of a few things, you know, basically word processing. But I don’t really know how to go online or anything. I’m gonna get around to e-mail one of these days. I really am.” Sidarra thought to herself, But I can remember the Control-86 Transfer Command, as if that meant something.
Griff chuckled quietly and continued walking the room. “The view is nice from here,” he said, pulling a drape back from the window and looking out.
She savored the long brown wing of his hard body as it became a silhouette in the remaining sunlight. “I’m sure my neighbors think so too.”
He stopped, forgetting that he was probably visible from the street. “No, I mean up here you’re just above the roofs of the buildings across the street. You can see for miles.” His eyes continued to scan. Then they prowled the street, roaming back and forth until something to the left caught his eye. Griff squinted to be sure. Then he pulled back from the window and closed the drapes together. “We have a little problem,” he said with a whole new expression on his face.
“What’s the matter?”
Griff saw Raul leaning against a gate down the block, completely inattentive to the cold. “I’m hoping it’s just a guardian angel,” he said. “But we gonna find out.” Griff peered through a crack for another moment, thought, He’s trouble, to himself, and turned back into the room.
22
FOR RAUL, being dangerous had not always been such a wonderful thing, but the choice was made for him very early in his life. Yakoob was among the few who could remember that Raul once had a smile, which he wore like a uniform beside his dad back in the time of salsa and Harlem River fishing. Benny’s boy was sweet, with an almost pretty face, and a squat, premuscular frame. Not just his father’s favorite child, but a beloved sidekick to all those who, like Koob, saw them coming back together, tackle box and rods in hand, from a Sunday sunrise on the pier, or heard Raul’s ready six-year-old giggle from behind the bulletproof glass and over the boom box playing EI Gran Combo. Benny went through a lot of jobs but liked to sell tré, nickel, and dime bags of Mexican skunkweed out of a small storefront on Third Avenue. The dark place always smelled of fried food, cheeba, and aged cat piss. Back there behind the partition, eating tinfoil plates of chichirrón de pollo with rice and beans next to his daddy, was Raul, usually being admonished to keep his sticky fingers off the merchandise, or hugged. He was one of those boys who, like young dogs, wanted to be hugged often; Benny had been the same way. One day, the music, the hugging, and the smiling ended when Benny stepped out from behind the bulletproof glass to deal with a loud customer and got shot in the face. Raul happened to be the only other person back there, alone to watch his papi die. He didn’t know what to do.
Neither did his face. Sometimes a look won’t take because the look can’t set, and what happened to Benny removed from Raul’s young face the possibility of any foreseeable smiles. Instead, the pup that loved hugging assumed the cool pose of a very mean dog. Now, in that part of Spanish Harlem at that time, once the boy leaves your face you better look sullen or be looking for a gay way downtown. Boys seldom showed their teeth after age eleven; Koob was excused because he was funny. But Raul took it to the level of a rare few—young guys who had a lot of need, little to say, and felt physical pain many days after other guys did. He never showed his teeth, even when he talked. Guys as old as his father, like Koob, knew that that made Raul especially dangerous. And eventually, usually after a spectacular act of heart or evil, guys like him left the block for prison.
There was the time as a twelve-year-old when Raul stood outside the Martinez bodega watching drug dealers play dominoes on one side while a game of chess was under way on the other. Koob was there, drinking malta beside Manny, a sometimes junkie dealing crack in the days when people still called it “base.” Manny was winning the dominoes game; across from him was his smack dealer, Hector, who was losing badly to a good customer. Hector hesitated on a move and miscounted.
“Ho, siit [Oh, shit],” Raul said aloud to himself, publicly emphasizing just how bad Hector had fucked up.
“What?” Hector spat, turning around in disbelief to see the kid with dead eyes mocking his game. “Shut the fuck up, little nigga!” he said. “And get the fuck outta here.” He pointed for Raul to walk away. The other men laughed in the shade and glanced back at the rickety card table where the game was played. Raul turned and looked over at the chess game for a moment, but he didn’t move. “Yo, you hear what I said?” Hector repeated. Everyone knew Hector was always strapped. “I will fuck your little ass up.”
From his fold-up chair, Hector stared over at Raul. Raul took a breath and stared back. The man was at least thirty. In those days, everybody spat a lot, especially in the summertime, but for men spitting was always the thing to do. Hector spat almost as an afterthought, or as a prelude to some more emphatic gesture. The gob fell near Raul’s imitation Nikes that his moms bought him on Fordham Road in the Bronx. Raul looked down at the spit on the sidewalk, and before it could register with anyone else, he spat back and caught Hector on the shoe. The corner, a cross-generational jury at least eleven men deep, stiffened with shock. Hector broke wild, forgetting it was a kid who spat on him, and pulled a pistol from inside his jacket. He wasn’t gonna shoot Raul just like that. He was gonna beat his face and his neck with the handle a few times, make him bleed and cry and eat shit instead of dying. Hector stood up and got in one clear blow, straight across Raul’s temple. Raul’s switchblade was out of his back pocket before the blood could appear, and suddenly Hector’s right shoulder was cut in three places. He was very fortunate that the chess players could hold Raul back; one of them suffered a two-inch gash just for being there. Nobody died that day. But nobody forgot it, least of all Yakoob, who had to love Raul’s nerve to avoid it. This was no longer a child. Benny’s boy had become a dog.
Raul’s grandmother didn’t want a dog in the house, and she ran the apartment while his mother was at one of her three jobs. Between Spanish soap operas and Spanish game shows, she had a different idea about what the young man of the house should be doing if he wasn’t going to school, like getting a job himself. She never cared for Raul’s father, who she thought was an angry loser, and she resented his son for slumping around her apartment like the living monument to his failures. His grandmother only spoke Spanish. When she started with him, he would talk back only in English. That would spark long yelling fights where only he knew what they were both saying. If Raul stuck around till evening when his mother got home, he could hear his grandmother talk bad about him before getting kicked out. Back on the block he’d smolder on street corners.
Cheeba became Raul’s best friend, and he ran with it wherever it would take him. Cheeba never looked wrong at him or questioned what he wasn’t doing. It spoke Spanish when Raul felt like it, English when he didn’t. And when cheeba hooked up with PCP, Raul could fuck and fight all night. Manny called it angel dust or Crazy Eddie. The first time he rolled some into a joint for Raul, it was like light. It clarified just what he wanted to do. It expanded the w
orld Raul knew beyond eight square blocks of Spanish Harlem and sent him on endless subway rides. Pulsing atop a train bench, quivering inside his own skin, Raul could always get there quickly on PCP, wherever “there” was. He would ride until his body stood up and walked out the open doors. He would climb the stairs into the night, winding up in Astoria, Queens, the Lower East Side, East New York, Brooklyn, or Williamsburg, occasionally finding girls who would fuck a crazy guy, often fighting just to see the blur of blows, up for days with a crew of users he’d meet, asleep for days more someplace. Usually near the river, taunted by rats, awakened by another sunrise without his dad.
His grandmother was right: he was gonna have to find a job if he wanted to come home again. Raul only came uptown to get his dust from Manny; back around the way, he might bump into Yakoob and ask him for a couple of dollars. But mostly, working meant empty aluminum cans in the early nineties. The homeless trolled the streets like walking boysenberries, bulging with black garbage bags full of tin. You got a nickel a can, and Raul could collect some cans. You needed fifteen dollars for a Bowery bed, plus the twenty dollars a day for pizza, Puerto Rican fried chicken, orangeade soda, and cheeba unless he was hallucinating. That’s a lot of cans. You had to stand around dirty while people finished lunch in midtown. You had to go into the alleys. You had to climb inside of Dumpsters. You had to kick ass just to keep what you had, and since you were kicking ass anyway, you might as well take from a motherfucker who’s not trying to make bed money at all, some motherfucker sleeping in a box someplace waiting to get his cans jacked. Which was helped by being dangerous, because the fearful put up less resistance—unless they were drunk. Raul nearly had to kill a big drunk for his cans one night, and that’s how he finally went to jail.
At Rikers, Raul got constitutionally clean—he dried out of his PCP addiction—and institutionally mean—he perfected his ability to hurt other men. His chiseled body stayed close to barbells as Raul sought revenge on the power he lost without PCP to guide him. Impressed by his rehab progress and attracted to his efficient violence, some of the guards let Raul smoke straight weed with them. That’s how he met Blane, the pot dealer. Blane was a friend of a friend of a Rikers guard who would eventually help Raul find the raging whiteboy weed that had all but replaced the Mexican skunkweed and the dime, nickel, and tré bags it came in.
The Importance of Being Dangerous Page 22