“Sometimes—” Jessica cut him off. As college faded behind her, Jessica realized her knowledge of world history was limited to Spain sending Columbus to “discover” America in 1492. When David went off, she felt like a moron.
“Try as I might—and I do, Jess, I really do—I can’t muster that something you feel … that concern, or whatever it is, that drives you and your bonfire. But Peter does. And for that reason, he can move a part of you I can never hope to touch. The world is too much with him, to paraphrase Wordsworth … And I’m …” He paused, but didn’t continue.
“The Brother from Another Planet,” Jessica said, smiling, using Alex’s nickname for him.
“Make light if you want, but I almost fell asleep when Peter was here last week. Bill Clinton, blah blah blah. Jesus Christ.”
“I know,” Jessica sighed, massaging his scalp with her fingertips. David was a history whiz, but he was so indifferent to current events, pop culture, and even racial issues. This barrier between them was getting harder to ignore. She could drop names like Louis Farrakhan or Clarence Thomas and get a blank gaze from David, so he definitely couldn’t deal with discussions about any thing her friends were talking about at work. Nothing. And forget about new music or television—except the sentimental old love stories, like Casablanca, that he watched on videotape. David lived in a world of books and jazz music.
She didn’t understand how a man who was so damn smart could choose ignorance. She read her Sun-News and New York Times every morning before going to work, and when she came home she found the newspapers wherever she’d left them, untouched.
“Whether you admit it or not, Peter wants to pull you away. He wants to do it with this first book, and then another. He doesn’t share our priorities, like family,” David said.
“That’s not fair.”
“Isn’t it? What does he have? Whom does he have?”
“David …”
“I’m only being honest. He has voter surveys and a yen for buried secrets. That’s all, Jessica. That’s all.”
Jessica was surprised to realize that her eyes were stinging with tears. This was cutting to her core for some reason. She really wanted to write this book. Yes, maybe she did crave the chance to bond with Peter, who gave a damn about the things everyday folks talked about at the beauty shop and on their lunch breaks. So what? Why couldn’t David see that their book might help people and make a difference? Was he really so oblivious to life outside their El Portal street?
Despite their differences, Jessica wanted to believe with her heart that she and David were soul mates. But sometimes their reliance upon each other scared her. Often, at bedtime, instead of making love or going to sleep, they spent hours talking about deep subjects like how the legacy of the African slave trade had transformed the world, or the essences of men and women, or the nature of love. And she learned something new from him every day, whether it was an unusual word in Spanish, the unsung conquests of some African emperor, or a verse from an Elizabethan sonnet. He even knew the Bible and the old-time spirituals inside and out. They had to work at it, but they found their common ground.
Ultimately, though, their differences returned, and she wondered how deeply they ran. How could she continue to overlook them, when they loomed so large?
Jessica didn’t notice at first that David had slipped his arm around her shoulder, and that his head was nuzzled against her neck. “Don’t go write a book now, Jess. Not now,” he was repeating in her ear softly, barely audibly, as though begging for his life.
6
“Your man is tripping, Jessica.”
“You’re telling me.”
Jessica had tried to reach Alexis at her job at the UM medical school’s hematology lab all morning, and her sister finally called her back at the newspaper at ten minutes to noon. Peter planned to have lunch with Jessica to hammer out details for the book proposal he wanted to send his agent by midweek. She’d just seen him vanish into Sy’s office. Lord, was he going to tell their boss already? Now she was nervous.
“I hate to talk about your husband, but you know what? He’s always tried to monopolize you, from the beginning. I’ll never forget how he carried on that time we wanted to see Janet Jackson. I mean, damn, he couldn’t let you go for one night? And you were so afraid you wouldn’t find a man that you put up with it.”
Ouch. Alex was right, at least partially. Jessica was grateful she wasn’t in her sister’s shoes; Alexis was single now, and still looking. Jessica wondered if her sister would ever get married, or if it mattered to her anymore.
Considering Jessica’s history with black men, David had been a godsend. Jessica and Alex won scholarships to a lily-white private school for gifted children when they were young, so they’d been socialized around whites except at church. When the scholarship money ran out, Jessica’s adjustment to a mostly black public high school hadn’t been easy. Huddles of black football players snickered at Jessica when she walked past, a gangly bookworm. One boy Jessica didn’t even know sneered at her, saying she must want to be white since she was in honors classes with all of those white kids. To fit in, Alex had taken on a homegirl demeanor and found a boyfriend in high school, but Jessica never did. She’d felt like the same outcast in college, even with twenty pounds more shape and a sassy haircut.
Then she met David, who was so different himself. She thought many blacks were so quick to judge her based on nothing; but David never made hurtful assumptions about her, and that had been such a relief.
Alex never saw it that way. Jessica remembered the sting she’d felt after introducing her sister to David in the beginning; Alex had already ripped her ear open for going to bed with a professor, especially so fast, but Jessica had hoped her sister would be as impressed as she was by David’s mind and manners, not to mention his incredible face. Didn’t happen. After spending only one afternoon with her and David, Alex told her later: “Jessica, don’t buy it. That man is running a game on you. He’ll never really care about anybody but himself.”
It had been a mean thing to say, Jessica thought. Mean and unjustified. Just because David had been shy with Alexis there? Because he wasn’t good at chitchat? Or maybe he seemed a little arrogant? What about all of the good things? Alex admitted she still couldn’t give Jessica a concrete reason for her first impression, and sometimes Jessica was convinced her sister had never learned to see past it.
“Look, it’s not like I snapped up the first loser who came along. Is it?” Jessica asked.
Alexis sighed. “No, girl. That’s not what I mean. You know David is something else. He’s fine, he’s intelligent, a model father. And he’s good to you, too, most of the time. I just think you tolerate all his clinging because you don’t think you have a choice.”
“Well, I’ll tell you what,” Jessica said, “I’d rather have him clinging than walking out the door.”
Alexis sighed, but didn’t say anything.
“What?” Jessica asked.
When Alexis spoke, her voice was low and stern. “It just pisses me off,” she said. “Look at the guilt trip that man has put on you. Like all you’re supposed to do with your life is sit and hold his hand. I don’t know where he gets that, but that’s not the way it works. Here you are about to accomplish something meaningful, and instead of toasting you with champagne, your own husband is making you feel like shit.”
“I know,” Jessica said softly.
“You think Daddy was ever like that with Mom? Hell, no. David should be boosting you up, not holding you down. You write that damn book, girl. Do you hear me? You write it. And then you write a whole bunch more.”
Jessica smiled, grateful to have Alexis to talk to. She’d learned long ago not to complain about her husband to her mother, since Bea remembered all slights long after Jessica had forgotten them. Bea would have a fit if she knew how much David opposed the book. Alexis, at least, was a little more objective. Not much, but a little.
“I will,” Jessica said, deciding.
Once again, Peter suggested O’Leary’s. He never got tired of the bar’s greasy chicken wings. Jessica ordered a Ceasar salad and opted for a beer this time. She felt like she needed it. Since it was too hot on the patio, they sat inside beneath a television set playing The Young and the Restless, her mother’s favorite soap. It was reassuring to glance up at the screen and recognize some of the actors playing the same characters she’d known when she was a devotee in high school; they were always there, year after year.
“Len had a surprise for me this morning,” Peter said.
“Who’s Len?”
“My agent. Leonard Stoltz. He mentioned our idea to an editor he knows, and she loves it. Len’s guessing we might be able to swing a forty thousand dollar advance.”
“A …”
“The snag is, we’d have to promise to use a case that’s getting a lot of press up there in New York now, some guy who locked his father in the basement until he starved to death. It’s not exactly within our purview of nursing facilities … and I know forty isn’t a lot, divided in half …”
Jessica’s mind was frozen. Somebody already wanted their book, and they hadn’t even written a proposal. Half of forty thousand was nearly half her annual salary. “… Len wants us to overnight the proposal today, so he’ll have something to show her while she’s still excited. Jess? You with me?”
That instant, using her husband’s nickname for her, Peter had sounded exactly like David. “I’m in shock,” she said.
He smiled, and she noticed his face was drenched in red, probably from a weekend on the beach. She could see tiny age lines near those oddly green eyes. “I knew you would be. And I know how I felt when I sold my first book, so I got you something to put on top of your computer while you work—for inspiration.”
He reached into his jacket pocket and brought out a paperweight, a six-inch troll with a wild tuft of purple hair, wearing glasses and holding a pencil. WRITE ON, it said.
“Oh, my god … Peter … you’re so sweet …”
“I’m only being sweet now because I’m about to turn into a hard-ass. The editor said our chances for a sale are better if we promise a quick turnaround, maybe even by June.”
“Four months …”
“Exactly. I want you to get to work on that Chicago case, the smothered woman. Maybe you should fly out there. In the meantime, at least get the police report. It’s good material.”
“I can’t even believe this is happening.”
Peter entwined their fingers across the tabletop and squeezed, one of his gestures that had confused Jessica in earlier days. He had a loving nature, like David, and he wasn’t ashamed to express it. Other patrons at the bar could stare if they wanted to at this middle-aged white man clasping the hand of a black woman in the corner under the TV. Jessica would have hugged him if not for the table separating them. She remembered what David had said about Peter trying to pull her away, and she felt a hint of shame. Jessica hoped, fervently, that Peter had someone special and deserving in his life, but she guessed that David was right. He probably didn’t. “We’re going to do this, lady. Together.”
Jessica smiled, but couldn’t speak. Later, when she would think about this lunch with Peter, she would realize that she’d never even told him how much his encouragement and faith meant to her. And how much he’d brightened her life since the first day he introduced himself, showing her how to use the computer system when she was a nervous stranger in the newsroom. How even his friendly gaze, some days, meant the world.
Like a fool, she’d said nothing at all.
7
Even now, alone, Dawit knew he was being watched.
One of the Searchers had found him, perhaps months before. He’d noticed a cigarette butt half buried outside the back door a week ago, his first physical clue; but other clues had been present for some time, especially his awareness, his certainty, of eyes following him. Maybe Khaldun had sent more than one.
Their methods were undoubtedly sophisticated. They may have equipped themselves with wires planted throughout his house, ears listening on his telephone line, discerning eyes intercepting his mail. He could put nothing past them. All the better, he thought. It should be clear to them that he had not betrayed the Covenant with Khaldun. He had never betrayed it. Why was mere separation always considered such a dire threat? All he wanted was peace.
Maybe they would leave him be this time.
Accidentally, scouring the house for signs of intruders—he did this daily now—Dawit unearthed the scratched, frayed clarinet case he’d hidden away in the cabinet below the bookshelf, among his papers. It had been ten years since he’d last seen the case. He opened the rusting latches and saw the fine stained-wood instrument, each section nestled in its proper indentation against the fading magenta felt, and the memories deluged him in a crystalline rush that made him take a step backward.
blowdaddyblow spideryousuredomakethatbabysqueal
His memory was so sharp that he imagined he could smell mingled cigarette and cigar smoke and illegal whiskey soaking through wooden floorboards.
ihearitspiderihearit sohotman takemehome
Dawit touched the dusty Grenadilla wood of his B-flat Laube clarinet, and his heart raced. His armpits felt pricked with perspiration. His fingers trembled as he lifted the mouthpiece from its bed and examined the cracked, dry reed. More quickly, he began to fit the instrument together.
It was Khaldun who had taught Dawit the joy of creating sounds in the House of Music, while Dawit spent those first bewildered years wondering if he really would live forever. Ten years stretched to fifty, and fifty to a hundred, and by then he knew he would be privy to delights most men would never experience. The learning!
Of all the other houses that made up his brotherhood’s community—the House of Mystics, the House of Science, the House of Meditation, the House of Tongues, and the House of History— Dawit had most treasured his studies in the House of Music. The first instrument Khaldun taught him to play was a simple, monochromatic flute carved from bamboo. Next, the stringed krar, with its wondrous ability to follow any human voice. And Khaldun had collected other instruments from around the continent: Egyptian lutes, bowl lyres from the lands south of them, the beautiful stringed kora from the far west coast, Bantu trumpets made from elephant tusks. And drums, of course, of every variety.
Dawit carried the love for music that Khaldun had cultivated in him wherever he went, always finding a way to indulge it. He’d bought this clarinet from a closet-sized music shop in Chicago in 1916, in January, his first day back in the States after his last short visit home.
How long had it been since he’d played his beloved instrument? At least fifty years, perhaps longer. He’d tried to make himself forget, but now the walls of his present were collapsing around him to clear space for the past, a happy past.
He moistened the reed with his lips and tongue, then blew. The aged reed spat at him. Too brittle. Damn it to hell. He searched the case for new reeds, or at least reeds that weren’t already worn out. He found two wrapped in a small cardboard box.
He put on a recording by Satchmo with his Hot Five, “Cornet Chop Suey,” turning up the volume until the music seemed to hold up the walls. After a breath to steel himself, he began to play. The reed and sticky keys fought against him. He was clumsy at first, stopping and starting as his head nodded to the music’s flow. He lost the beat and honked when he should have found the notes, but then it began to fit back together again. Oh man, oh man.
His fingers played under, over, and around the cornet’s lead. He had it, the way he had it then, just like that one precious time when the remarkable young cornet player from Kid Creole’s band appeared from nowhere, climbing up onstage with Dawit and his boys—”Hey, lemme try this one, boys,” the kid said with a wink. Then he gallantly pulled out the piano stool for Lil, his delicate- boned little wife—and they played their hearts out, almost enough to bring tears to the others’ eyes, who were just trying
to keep up. “Cornet Chop Suey,” the kid told them it was called. Just wrote it, he said. Wanted to try it on for size.
That kid was something else. As much as Dawit loved to play with his own boys, he began looking forward to the end of their nightly gigs. And then he wasn’t ashamed, like every other true musician he knew in town, to find that kid wherever he was playing and watch him hold a club in a trance late into the night. He reminded Dawit of Khaldun, the way he drew them all around him.
Goddamn, he could go!
To go back there again and hear Louis Armstrong with his Stompers at the Everleigh Club! No, the Sunset Cafe. Nineteen twenty-seven. No one could play like Satchmo. No one.
yougotitboy yougotit
Playing on, Dawit heard his clarinet’s smooth notes swirling around his head. His flying fingers hurt. He blew until his face was dripping.
“You go on, Spider, show these cats something.”
“What ‘chu call this band?”
“The Jazz Brigade. Here every Friday and Sat’day night. Place jumps.”
“What’s that cat’s name on horn? Blowing the stick?”
“Bandleader. Spider Tillis.”
“His mama named him Spider?”
“Name of Seth Tillis. Hey, Spider! Man say we gon’ make a recording!”
My Soul to Keep (African Immortals) Page 7