Now that he was making good on his promise to Lauren and spending more time with his father, they often pored over family photo albums. They sat together, his father relying on a shrinking vocabulary and a battered ability for recall. They had lost so much, Sean would think, watching his father’s fingers trace the faces in the photos. But the communion created from the silences and puzzles and empty space the disease imposed managed to fill him with a sense of the life lived between them, and something very much like love planted its flag.
Sean looked away from the sight of the library and saw Lauren walking toward him.
“So sorry I’m late,” she announced as she sauntered to the table.
Lauren looked both ready for business and feminine in a burgundy-colored suit and sheer black blouse. Her light brown dreadlocks were chin length and framed a face that Sean thought was quite lovely. This was the sister who had confessed to him one night in high school that she had always felt like an ugly duckling, as they sat parked in his car outside the house and shared a joint.
Lauren tossed a small, black leather handbag onto the chair between them, settled into her seat, and grabbed a menu, saying, “Let’s order. I’m starved.”
“Not starved enough to be on time.”
“Truce, please?”
Sean signaled for their waitress, as thin and lacquered as a runway model, and they ordered. Lauren grabbed a slice of pita bread from the basket on the table.
“You look good,” Sean said. “So carrying the weight of Caldwell & Tate hasn’t brought you down?”
“Is that what you’re waiting for?”
“Come on, you made your choice, and I made mine.”
“You’re talking to one of the three managing partners. They made me a partner not just because my last name is Tate, but because in the short time I’ve been with the firm, I earned that spot. Mercer lobbied for me and that helped, too.”
“Mom told me. Congratulations.”
“And you?”
“I’ve got my crew renovating a couple of houses across the river. Anacostia is the new frontier. I just wish Dad could see all this, what I’m doing. And understand it.”
“You ought to take him to one of your projects one day. I keep telling you, Sean, it doesn’t look like it, but he’s still there.”
His father was still there. One evening, Sean had asked his mother why he felt closer to his father now than he ever had. He confided that more than once he had looked into Gregory’s distant, always disconcerting stare and whispered, “I love you, Dad.” Why, he had asked his mother, did he feel able, emboldened to say that to a man who he was sure could not understand what he said, the words people spent their lives longing to hear.
“I don’t know, Sean,” she’d said. “Maybe it’s because he is literally stripped to his core. There’s nothing like pride or vanity or bitterness left for him. He’s terribly, horribly free. And maybe, just maybe that opens up a region in our souls, too.”
Their orders arrived, a dozen small plates of Greek, Lebanese, and Mediterranean food: hummus, eggplant, falafel, ground lamb, and more. Finding space on the table for all the plates was a feat that their waitress managed with skill and good humor.
They tackled the small plates before them as though their hunger was more than physical, as though it resided in a dangerous place they had both inadvertently touched. The restaurant, all hardwood floors, open windows, and chrome, the size of a warehouse, was loud as an echo chamber.
“I told Mom I could move in for a while if she wanted me to until she gets used to being in the house alone. There’ve been a couple of burglaries on her street,” Sean said. “I talked it over with Valerie and she’d understand.”
“What did Mom say?”
“What do you think? ‘I can handle it.’”
“I’m not surprised,” Lauren said. Her cell phone rang and looking at the screen, Lauren said, “I’ll call them later.” She then looked at Sean.
“This has nothing to do with Mom, but I’ve always wanted to ask you, Sean. There’s a test you can take to see if you might develop Alzheimer’s. Would you take it?”
“I’d be afraid to know.”
“Uncle Bruce says he counsels against it. Says the test isn’t entirely reliable and there’s no more you can do to fight it the day after you know you have the gene than the day before. And that it could affect your insurance, employment. What would I do with the information if it was bad? How would it affect the rest of my life?” Lauren asked, slumping back against her chair, fingering the rim of her water glass. “I mean, tell me, how do you even prepare for something like this?”
This was the third test. Each time, the plus sign in the window of the plastic stick informed Lauren that she was pregnant. Plus sign. Positive. So why was she flooded with a foreboding that increased with each test? She and Gerald were good, they were happy together. Why was she so certain that this child, real and tangible in her imagination long before peeing on a plastic strip in her toilet, would change everything?
Lauren looked at the results again and then tossed the test into the trash can. She wiped herself, pulled up her panties, washed her hands, and went into her bedroom. Lying on her bed, she hugged herself, willed herself not to cry, and thought of her friends Whitney and Marla who had taken her to the club where she and Gerald met. Both had had abortions.
“The relief was a godsend,” Marla had told Lauren. “I got a second chance to have the life I wanted.”
Whitney had said, “I felt a lot of things—relief, but also regret that I had not anticipated, and guilt. But the relief, that never went away. The other emotions in time, they did.”
Why was she thinking about abortions when, for her, that was not an option? No matter what Gerald said, she would have this baby. Their child.
Everything in her life until now had felt ordained by her genes, her talent, her father. Having this child was her first adult decision. She would mother her child with bold intentions. But how would that child be fathered? Her father had told her to have a life. Now life had her by the throat, and she inhaled its tingling and raw effervescence. She was afraid but she could breathe.
Lauren looked at the clock. It was Saturday night and she was meeting Gerald and some friends downtown in a new Spanish restaurant near Union Station. As she dressed, to calm herself, she thought about her and Gerald, about the things that made them a couple that Marla and Whitney both teasingly and convincingly said they envied.
The Sunday afternoon Redskins parties that she attended in the basement of his family’s rambler in New Carrollton were raucous affairs where football became a blood sport among the seven Stone siblings and their girlfriends, wives, and children. Gerald’s father, who worked for Pepco, was a Dallas Cowboys fan. His mother wanted the Redskins to change their name but said she’d support them win, lose, or draw.
Lauren didn’t even like football, but on those Sundays, squeezed onto the leather sofa between Gerald and his mother, Nadine, she felt like she had another family. A family where no one was sick with a disease whose name she could not bear to speak.
Then there was the day Gerald had spent an afternoon with her as she drove to several Caldwell & Tate projects in the city, explaining, “I want to see what you do.”
At a bar the previous week, they’d sat drinking and munching on exotic, artsy appetizers, all before going to see a review of comedians D. L. Hughley and George Lopez at the Warner Theater. His friend Lucian had leaned across the small table and asked, “So when are you two making it official?”
“Make what official?” Gerald had asked.
“What you got going on,” he said, a broad conspiratorial grin beaming at Lauren and Gerald. “Y’all look like an ad for one of those dating services.”
“We’re doing just fine. Just fine.” Gerald laughed, throwing a possessive arm around Lauren. “Don’t give her any ideas.”
Lauren had laughed nervously and wanted in that moment to remove Gerald’s arm.
“We’re not.” Gerald laughed again, too loudly, Lauren thought, as he leaned across the table and theatrically slapped palms with Lucian. Then to Lauren, he said, “We’ve arrived where we were headed. Smack dab in the middle of a comfort zone and it feels real good, right babe?”
Lauren had looked at Gerald and chose silence as an act of mild defiance. Her mother had told her once that silence and inaction were two of the most unrecognized power moves.
“Anyway,” Gerald had said, looking slightly annoyed but clearly driven to shut down Lucian’s jocular inquiry. “Okay, I’ll speak for us both. We’re just fine. In our comfort zone. With no surprises.”
Now dressed, Lauren put on her silver earrings and looked in the mirror one last time. She liked what she saw.
Five hours later, after they had returned to her apartment, after she had tasted the pungent remnants of rum and Coke on his tongue as they kissed, after they laughed about the evening they had just shared, she told him.
He was silent. But the silence was not silent at all; instead it was a crackling electric heat groaning in the space between them. He was sitting, his legs spread, arms resting on his thighs. At the sound of her words, her declaration, what Lauren thought of as their truth, Gerald hung his head. She wasn’t sure if he was avoiding her gaze in anger or defeat.
I’ll touch him, Lauren thought. Her first thought now was to comfort Gerald. Comfort him as though he had been wounded. Hurt by what she had revealed.
“Aren’t you on the pill?” He raised his head so she could see the disbelief, the mistrust, in his eyes. That question answered everything she had wondered. Closed every door she thought stood open between them.
“Yes, but nothing’s foolproof. Even with the pill there’s a five percent chance of pregnancy.”
Gerald stood up, able, it seemed, only to place distance between them as he paced. She watched him pacing, the noisy silence threatening to engulf them again. She thought to apologize, to say “I’m sorry,” but then wondered why she would lie.
“What do you want to do?” He had stopped pacing and stood still, asking her. The fact that she could not read the emotions on his face terrified her.
“I want to have it.”
The admission forced him to sit down in a chair across from her. “I’m not ready to be a father.”
“I’m ready to be a mother.”
“So I guess that’s all that matters?”
“This is a shock, Gerald, I know that, but we did this together.”
“I guess we did.”
He could not say he loved her. How was that possible, she wondered, when she felt her love like a contagion? When she walked through her life giddy but balanced, convinced that if need be, she could fly.
“I wish you could say you loved me. But loving our baby, I’ll take that. Not as a consolation prize, but as the way it has to be.”
“I just need some time.”
“Time for what?” she shouted. “To fall in love with me by default? Because I’m carrying your child? What do I have to do?”
“Lauren, calm down. We’ve got a good thing. A great thing. We’ve got our whole lives.”
“I don’t feel that way, Gerald. I’ve got today. I’ve got now. Right now, this is my whole life.”
“I’ll be there for you and the baby. Don’t make me a bad guy. I said I’d step up. I won’t let you down.” The words were an unconvincing whisper.
Lauren thought, but did not say, But I want you to hold me up.
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” he stammered. “I feel trapped by this, all of a sudden. Out of nowhere.”
“Nowhere? What have the last six months meant to you? So that’s where we’ve been, nowhere? So then all this has meant nothing.”
“Did I say that?”
“Yes, in a way you did. Yes, that’s how I heard it.”
“I care about you, Lauren, you know that.”
“But you don’t love me.”
Gerald hid his face in his hands.
There was nothing left. No other way to stand up for her child. And so that’s what Lauren did. She stood up slowly, unfurling her body with a methodical grace and calm. Standing before Gerald she offered him her hand.
“I love you, Gerald. I love our baby. Tonight, love me. Love us.”
Their coupling was a storm, for Lauren an act of greed and hunger, for Gerald both surrender and retreat. Lauren cradled him beneath her heart, clinging to him. When she woke in the morning, groggy, unfulfilled, he was gone.
Lauren couldn’t tell her mother that the house was falling apart. Not now, with everything she was dealing with. The leaking faucets in the bathroom, the chipping paint, the worn hardwood. This house no longer felt like her childhood home. They had both changed.
Sitting on the carpeted floor flipping through channels as her mother thumbed through a textbook she was considering using for her classes at Howard next year, Lauren asked, “What if I’m having the baby because we’re losing Dad?”
“There are worse reasons for having a child,” Diane said, closing the book.
“Mom, I haven’t heard from Gerald in two weeks, not since the night I told him. He’s not answering my texts or calls.”
“Give him some time.”
“I won’t beg him to do the right thing.”
“Lauren, you told me he said he’d do exactly that. It’s just that your definitions of ‘the right thing’ are probably different at this point.”
“I won’t ask him for anything he doesn’t want to give. I don’t need him. I can do this alone if I have to.” Rising from the floor, Lauren reached for her mother, burrowed into the shelter offered by her arms. “Am I wrong? To want this baby? Was I unfair to him?”
“Of course not. He’s not wrong for needing some time to take all this in.”
“Mom, are you lonely?”
“That’s a word that has a lot of different meanings.”
Lauren gently pulled out of her mother’s embrace and asked, “What do you miss most about Dad? Since all this started I don’t think I ever asked you that.”
“Him seeing me. Knowing me. Understanding me. When I come home now, that’s when it hits me. How much I’ve lost. I’d give anything, Lauren, to get that back. I miss your father. I miss our life. Very much.”
Chapter Seventeen
SEPTEMBER 2015
He cannot sleep on nights like this one, so he slips out of the room they gave him and walks the long hallway. Walks until one of the women who wear the white pants and the blue tops and the white shoes, appears and takes his arm, her palm at his back, and steers him back to bed. This night, he has decided to trick them. Before, he would leave the room fully dressed, his shoes sliding against the floor’s surface. That was how they found him.
But tonight, naked and noiseless, he creeps along the long hallway of rooms where the others must be sleeping, the darkness broken by night-lights plugged into the walls in the meeting room, the den, the TV room. His clothes lay in a forlorn pile at the foot of his bed, for he tore off the shirt, ripping the tiny buttons, hearing them pop into the air and then land with a soft thud on the floor. Stepping out of his pants and underwear, he left them stationed, waiting for the return of his legs to give them life.
He moves through this place naked, unhampered. Up the stairs, although there is no need to, he tiptoes, holding the bannister, relieved of the confusion within confusion that haunts him during the day, looking into the faces of the others. He grabs the steel knob and slowly opens the door. The lower floor is miles behind him. So he walks, his shoulders and head high. It is enough to softly trek these long, narrow hallways, so many more than in the house of the woman who brought him here. He turns a sharp left, a sharp right, and another hall awaits him. His destination is surely close. Nocturnal smells singe the air—sleep, tossing, turning, an odd moan, a cry like an infant from behind the doors he
passes. These things possess an aroma unique to and brought forth by the day’s end. His naked body even smells different at night, perfumed by the day just past, humming in his muscles, etched on his skin.
Down these corridors he moves, further with each step away from the women who are like nurses. As he runs down the halls naked, Wallis Peebles, who was the first of the other residents to speak to him and tell him her name the day he was brought here, opens her door, clutches the collar of her robe at her throat, and calls out, “Where are you going? Can I go with you?” Wallis rushes out of her room with a sheet to cover his body and helps the nurse blanket him, swaddle him in the sheet, then stands in the middle of the hallway waving good-bye, calling behind him, “Bon voyage,” as the nurse leads him away.
In this place, where loneliness festers and desire is a haunting, unforgotten sign of life, Wallis Peebles knows that Gregory has been sent as an answer to her prayers. He bears himself as though in the other life, before this place, he had mastered his world.
If she had not tried, one too many times, to leave on her own, without her family knowing where she was headed, she would still be in her apartment in the senior citizens’ complex. She knew where she wanted to go, told the taxi drivers to take her to Woodward and Lothrop, downtown on Eleventh and G Street. But they all said what her nephew Kevin told her, that Woodward and Lothrop, where she worked as a milliner for twenty years, was torn down years ago. All she wants to do is go to Woodies and see one of her hats in the window.
All her life she has loved hats. A woman became a lady, a queen, in a hat. Her success at Woodies inspired her to open her own shop with money borrowed from her sister and brother, a tiny place squeezed in between a tailor shop and a Chinese carry-out on T Street, not far from the Howard Theater. There she flourished for a while, but then when women started wearing short skirts, pants, and stopped wearing hats, only the Sunday church ladies came to her shop. So she had to go back to Woodies. But it was there that she became the lead designer and made hats for the rich white ladies who gave society parties in Georgetown and on Capitol Hill, the wives of congressmen and senators.
The Wide Circumference of Love Page 17