“That’s wonderful. So you’re a musician.”
“Yeah, when I was younger I played in a local band. At one point, Motown was interested.”
“Oh.” Diane shivered with delight. “Why didn’t you make a go of it?”
“I wasn’t made for that life. The clubs were filled with inattentive, half-drunk audiences and rooms full of smoke. The other musicians were talented but too often just plain trifling. They’d miss rehearsals, let women problems interfere with gigs, and we never got paid what we were worth.”
Having finished their meals, Diane and Alan lingered in the austere, nondescript dining room. A group of Ethiopian men sat huddled over their meals nearby, speaking their native tongue, their comradeship loud and jocular. As she watched Alan stack their cartons and cutlery and take them to the trash container, she felt anointed.
Finally, Alan slid his business card across the table. “I enjoyed this, Diane. I don’t know about you, but I can always use a friend. Will you call me?”
Diane searched her pocketbook for her own card and then handed it to Alan. “I’d be glad to do that.”
When Alan took the card, he captured Diane’s hand in his and held it encased in his palms. “That’s good to know, very good to know.”
At home, preparing for bed, Diane reached in her drawer for her gown, a faded pink-and-white cotton nightdress she’d worn for the last four or five winters. Rummaging in the rear of the drawer, her hands found the cool, slippery material of a silk negligee she had not worn in years. The ivory-colored gown lay in her palms and she inhaled its musky scent then rubbed the sheer fabric against her cheeks.
First, it was memory; then touch was the next to go. The good-morning, good-bye, good-night kiss—over time, Gregory could only tolerate them impatiently before slipping from her grasp, turning from the aching and abandoned lips Diane offered. They lived bound by a chastity strictly enforced by the stranger residing in her husband’s body. They had always loved with passion and imagination, but now she was consigned to a kind of sexual exile. When she pleasured herself at night, in the dark, lying beside Gregory as he snored sweetly as a child, or in the last year, while he trekked the hallways of the house outside the locked bedroom door, Diane had called forth the sight of Gregory’s face, staring at her intently and exhausted as he hunched over her, their bodies bound by the slick thread of their joint release.
In the bathroom, after a shower, gazing at herself in the steam shrouded mirror, Diane said, “I’m a mess.”
She opened the towel and let it drop to the bathroom floor. Her hair was uneven, unruly. It was time for a trim. Finally, in the last month, she had begun sleeping through the night again, but the circles under her eyes were evidence of the long parade of fitful nocturnal struggles. She had to get back to the gym. What had Alan Rich seen, looking at her?
Maybe she was a mess, but Diane allowed herself to recall the incendiary thoughts and feelings Alan had inspired. She had sat across from him one part the respectable, middle-aged judge, and one part a woman drawn physically to a man and striving mightily to hide it. She felt her thighs stained by a moist trickle of desire. Beneath her touch, the skin of her breasts was soft as a newborn’s. She had buried, forgotten, and been stripped of so much. She whispered as her hand retrieved the towel, “Please, God, not this, too.”
The coffee shop was chapel-quiet. Watching the people at other tables staring at phones and computer screens with the intensity of scientists in a lab breaking a genetic code, Diane thought how the coffeehouse had become a kind of church, and coffee itself, a sacrament.
A profusion of small wooden tables and matching chairs. A windowsill that was home to philodendrons desperate for watering. Exposed brick walls. Posters of an eternally young Bob Marley, his broad, toothy, ecstatic smile an invitation, and a debonair, white-haired Tony Bennett. Three bookshelves of poetry, self-help, and biographies of radical political activists beside the counter and cash register and makeshift kitchen—that was the décor.
This neighborhood off of the busy, traffic-clogged Rhode Island Avenue had been christened Bloomingdale. Communities that, in Diane’s childhood, were known by a major street or thoroughfare now were designated by sprightly names conjuring up feelings and images of contentment.
Diane smiled when she saw Alan walk through the door and hold it for a young blonde entering behind him. She had called him three days after their dinner at Whole Foods and made a date to meet today, a week later. What, she wondered, was the etiquette for this? His buoyant, seductive energy inspired a surge of starkly sexual desire. Alan removed his sheepskin-lined hat as he walked toward her table and there was his bald shiny pate. He loosened the buttons on his sheepskin jacket, seeming eager to present himself, his full self to her. He sat down, easing into the small chair gracefully.
“It’s good to see you again.” He smiled jovially as he stuffed his leather gloves into his coat pocket. “You beat me to the punch. I wanted to call, but for all my forthrightness that evening, I was unsure of the etiquette, you know what I mean.”
“I’m still unsure myself. We’ll figure it out,” Diane said with more confidence than she felt.
“What were you thinking about when I walked in?”
“I was thinking about the personality of the city now, how cookie-cutter it’s become with the same mix of coffee shops, yoga studios, overpriced gourmet restaurants, and bakeries. Apparently, funkiness in the way we used to know it has been banned. When was the last time you saw a hog maw or a chitlin? Or a store that sold pickles or pickled pigs’ feet in one of those big jars?”
“Don’t tell me you eat that stuff. Nostalgia has its limits, you know. It’s probably just as well, as my mama used to say, that back in the day we had no idea how toxic that stuff was.”
“It kept generations of our people alive.” Diane laughed.
“I know a hole-in-the-wall place off Columbia Road that’s got the city’s best sweet potato pie, the required amount of dirt and grime, a sister behind the counter wearing a hairnet, potatoes fried in two-week-old bacon grease, and in the summertime, they got no air conditioning. Wanna head over there now?”
“Oh, come on,” Diane chided Alan.
“So in other words, you were sitting here waiting for me thinkin’ really deep thoughts?”
Alan asked her what she wanted to drink and went to the counter and ordered two coffees.
Settling back at the table, Alan pried the plastic top off of his coffee. Diane reached for several packets of sugar and three plastic pods of creamer from the pile he had placed between them.
“So you like your coffee sweet? Or should I say, you like coffee with your cream?”
“Guilty on both counts. And you like yours black?”
“And strong.”
In the midst of this back and forth, Diane realized that she was flirting. She was sporting a new haircut. Putting together a pink cashmere turtleneck sweater and black shawl draped over her shoulder with black earrings and matching necklace had consumed nearly an hour, as she searched not just for the right clothes to wear, but for a new persona to present to this man who she hoped would not be a stranger much longer.
“You know,” Alan began, “Alzheimer’s makes family of us all. When my mother had it, I was the only man in my support group, but I couldn’t have cared for my mother without it.”
“The assisted living option hasn’t been a panacea, but it’s given me back more of my life, and that’s the main thing.”
“With me, Alzheimer’s affected my relationships with my sisters, who didn’t inherit the compassion gene and who pushed off the major responsibility for our mother onto me. They say men aren’t intuitive; that’s a lie. My intuition was working overtime. But you know what got me through all the ugliness of the divorce? My mother. Visiting her in the home where everything had become so simple. I’d go to the home sometimes fuming because of an argument with Beverly and sit there with my mother answering her questions about friends of h
ers who had died years ago or listening to her telling me again about something she’d done before I was born. It was like therapy. My wife didn’t love me anymore, and having to care about my mother kept me from becoming bitter.”
“What drew you to work with ex-offenders?”
“Seeing so many of the young men who had either been in classes I taught or who attended schools where I was a principal end up behind bars. I wasn’t able to stop the pipeline at its source so I figured maybe I could help at the end.”
“I saw the same thing working as a public defender. That’s why I turned to family law. Do you miss anything about the school system?”
“The kids mostly. There are still so many good, decent kids in the schools you never hear about. They get swallowed up by all the labels: inner-city, at-risk. Bush promised not to leave any student behind while Obama’s got administrators racing to the top like crabs in a barrel.”
“Are you hungry?” he asked when she was done with her coffee.
“Actually, yes.”
They drove in separate cars to Chinatown and ate a leisurely dinner. When they parted, standing in front of Diane’s car, Alan leaned in and enfolded Diane in an embrace pulsing with unspoken promises. Diane surrendered to Alan’s touch, grateful for the possessiveness it contained. Closing her eyes, it was his face and his only that she saw rising to fill the shadowy vacant space.
Chapter Nineteen
NOVEMBER 2015
Sean’s first visit to Somersby had confirmed all his fears. His father, a man who had helped shape the landscape of a city, was now confined to this place. It was as “nice” as his mother and Lauren had told him, but the quiet to Sean sounded like what waited for him in his grave. The residents all looked fine until you looked closely.
So, most days, he took his father out, anywhere: for a walk in a nearby park, for a slice of pie and cup of coffee at a diner in College Park. He’d joked with Valerie that although he didn’t have to employ cunning, violence, or threats, each time he walked through the doors of Somersby with his father out into the world, he felt he was involved in a prison break.
Sean reached his father through stories. Stories, wasn’t that all that conversation was? The stories he told his father were narratives peopled by his clients and his crew. Gregory had come to nod his head in what seemed, and felt to Sean, like understanding.
He had arrived early today to take his father to Ruth’s Chris Steak House for dinner to celebrate his birthday. Valerie, Cameron, his mother, sister, and Mercer would meet them there. He tied his father’s tie around his neck, a singularly confounding task that he recalled his father teaching him to do when he was twelve.
“We’ve got a few minutes, Dad,” Sean said, sitting down. His dad’s room made him feel claustrophobic, but here at least they had some privacy. “I finally did it. I let Archie go.”
“Archie.”
“You know, the guy I’ve been telling you about who I’ve depended on for so long but who’s got a drinking problem?”
The blank stare no longer pained him, for he knew it did not necessarily signal incomprehension.
“It was the best thing to do but it was still hard, y’know. I don’t know how you and Mercer did it. People look at the finished product and have no idea how much it cost in human terms to erect or renovate a building. Maybe they shouldn’t know.”
“I have to pay the staff,” his father announced. Then he looked at Sean, his eyes narrowing in assessment and said, “I want to give you a raise.”
“Dad, I told you, I don’t need a raise and I’ll take care of the payroll. You don’t have to worry about that.” Here he was in the present and also back in the terrifying roller-coaster past with his father. Pretending. Make-believe. Creating a now from the soil of a past his father hungered for and was deeply rooted in. More and more often when Sean visited, Gregory imagined that he was an employee of Caldwell & Tate. Sean had learned how to glide through his father’s alternate reality, with only an occasional stumble.
“Riggs Bank,” Gregory said, a bank that had closed its doors in the city years ago.
“Yes, I went there yesterday and made a deposit. Just like you told me to,” Sean spoke the words of deceit calmly.
“Did you bring the receipt?” Gregory demanded skeptically.
“I sure did.” Sean reached in his pocket and handed his father a deposit slip he had filled out earlier in the day, for this visit. This transaction had become a ritual between them. It did not matter that the deposit slip bore the name of his bank, Wells Fargo. His father imagined himself still at the helm of Caldwell & Tate, managing accounts, overseeing staff.
Gregory walked over to his desk drawer and placed the slip of paper in a small wooden box he had shown Sean the first day he visited him. “My money, in case I die. You know. My money,” he had said placing his hand on Sean’s shoulder. Sean had looked into the box and seen only a pile of tiny scraps of paper.
“Go ahead and blow them out, Daddy. Go on.”
Diane watched as Gregory warily assessed the two candles in the shape of a six and a nine lodged atop a coconut birthday cake. Overcoming his skepticism, Gregory leaned forward and expelled a half-hearted exhalation, then slumped back heavily against his chair.
The candles extinguished, Lauren began slicing the cake. Diane, Sean, Valerie, Cameron, and Mercer sat around the table in the private dining room at Somersby where they had come after an early dinner at the steak house, to celebrate Gregory’s birthday.
Through the French doors that separated them from the larger dining area, Diane saw some of the other residents watching the unfolding of this occasion. Fredrick Connor, a burly ex-fireman; the history teacher, Emma Bradley; and Trent Simpson, a small, wiry man who wore a patch over one eye as the result of a childhood accident, all waved at Diane through the doors. She waved back. Residents were informed of birthdays and Lynette had told Diane that earlier in the day, lunch had concluded with residents singing “Happy Birthday” to Gregory and eating slices of cake.
And there was Wallis, at a table with three other women, who sat in what seemed to Diane from this distance to be nervous, twittering awe of her. Wallis held forth with a monarch’s confidence, her face an elastic, expressive mask.
“I brought you a gift,” Lauren said, handing Gregory a box wrapped in glistening silver paper. Gregory simply placed the box on the table beside his untouched slice of cake, so Mercer said, “I’ll open it for you.”
“It’s an electric shaver, Gregory,” he said. “Old man, you’re beginning to look like a caveman with that beard.”
“When you want to shave, Daddy, that’s what it’s for.”
Gregory nodded at the sight of a thick cardigan sweater that Sean lifted out of his gift box. There was a wool scarf from Mercer.
With more ceremony and seriousness than was required, Diane left her seat beside Mercer and sat down beside Gregory and slowly brought out of a large shopping bag a plush, tan leather briefcase.
Setting it on the table before Gregory, she said, “For a new set of dreams.”
“Mom. That’s beautiful.” Lauren sighed, leaning in closer to admire the gift.
“You can use it for anything, Dad,” Sean said.
“Don’t leave it anywhere near me, man, or it’s gone,” Mercer joked heartily.
“Go on, open it,” Diane urged him.
Gregory opened the snaps and reached inside. He retrieved several framed photographs. Diane moved closer to Gregory and the others stood behind them as she told the story of each picture: Gregory and Diane smiling into the camera from a table on a cruise to Bermuda. Diane and Gregory dwarfed by the pyramids of Giza on the trip he had longed for all his life. There was a photo of Lauren in hair rollers, wolfing down a slice of pizza at a birthday party sleepover when she turned sixteen. Sean shooting hoops in the backyard after his barbecue birthday party when he turned eighteen. Diane, chic and beaming, in a formal gown and Gregory in a tuxedo on the dance floor of the Gran
d Hyatt at the party Gregory had thrown for her fiftieth birthday. Gregory stared at the photo of Lauren, then pointed to Lauren, saying, “That’s her.”
“Yes, Daddy, that’s me.” Lauren giggled in delight.
“I saw a picture of the pyramids in school,” Cameron said as he held the photo of the trip to Egypt in his hands before Valerie lead him back to his seat.
A gentle knock on the French doors interrupted them, and Diane looked up to see Wallis standing outside the door. She was dressed in a thick caftan as bold as a box of crayons and she was carrying a gift.
Lauren looked at her mother quizzically.
“Open the door, Lauren.” Diane sighed.
But before Lauren could move, Wallis burst into the room.
“Hello,” Wallis said cheerily, as though they had all been expecting her.
Wallis barreled toward Gregory, thrusting a gift into his hand. Gregory’s eyes brightened and he smiled for the second time that evening and took the small box clumsily wrapped in silver paper. Blushing, he sat up in his chair, clearly revived.
Then Wallis hugged Gregory, her breasts stationed in his face, her hands and blazing red nails squeezing his head. Gregory lay against her sublime and relaxed. Releasing him, Wallis spotted an empty chair and dragged it beside Gregory, trying to squeeze between Diane and Gregory.
“Move, move,” she ordered Diane, pushing her so hard she nearly fell onto the floor.
Cameron asked Valerie, “Who is that lady, Mommy?”
“That’s enough, that’s enough,” Sean said, standing up. He shared a gaze with Mercer and both men approached Wallis, who, as they neared her jerked wildly in fright and turned around, her fists pummeling Sean’s chest. The altercation and the noise brought Lynette running toward the room.
“Stop. Stop. Help,” Wallis screamed.
Lynette expertly moved Sean and Mercer away from Wallis and led her out the door, soothing and comforting her. “Now Wallis, come on. It will be all right.”
The Wide Circumference of Love Page 19