Norma must have thought so too. She sped to Gaston’s house and roused him and must have given him a hell of an ultimatum. You go over there this instant and write those dear people a check that wouldn’t even dent your smallest checking account. Does family mean nothing at all to you? Norma had a backup threat, Josh recounted. Norma had a sister, widowed, retired in Arizona who had asked her to come out to live. She would do it. She would pack her bags and go, leaving the Cordelia Florabloom enterprise to founder and Gaston to go to hell. And Josh heard that Gaston pulled out his checkbook and said, You’re right, Norma. He wrote her a check for the plane fare and said, Don’t let the door hit you on the way out. Be careful around the cactus, and watch out for rattlesnakes.
And Norma left. At some point, even Norma had had enough abuse and neglect. She stopped by the Johnston house, rooms empty of furniture, FOR SALE sign in the yard, Jerene and Duke camping out more or less, and said her goodbyes. There were long hugs and expressions of mutual sympathy. What could any of them do? Gaston was who he was. And Norma left for Scottsdale.
Dorrie’s conquest of 2009, Hazel Moultrie, head of the English Department at UNC Charlotte, didn’t last too long (she was separated from her husband of thirty years, but still closeted, didn’t want to tell her teenage kids). Hazel offered a shaft of clarifying light. As Dorrie recounted the adventures of Gaston Jarvis—Hazel loved literary gossip—they discussed how Norma had a potentially successful lawsuit if she wanted to sue for some of the Cordelia books’ profits, since she virtually produced them. As they cuddled, Hazel added, “And I’m glad Miss Norma wised up. Now we await the day you will wise up.”
“Me?”
“Why are you micromanaging the social life of Joshua Johnston? It’s like you’re his minder, like you’re hauling Benjy Compson around in a cart all day making sure he doesn’t get into trouble. I’d let that go, sugar. See to your own happiness.” Then Hazel pulled her closer as if Hazel herself constituted that future happiness, which Dorrie knew even then was not the case.
It troubled Dorrie. With what passion she scrambled and arranged on Josh’s behalf, paying to get rid of Calvin, stationing herself nightly beside him at the laptop to condemn or approve Josh’s online entanglements, trying to head off the ridiculous Nonso at the pass, so—for what?—she could have Josh, platonically, all to herself? Because Dorrie knew best what would make Josh happy? What made it easy to take a step back was that Nonso did bring his skinny black ass over from Nigeria for that program at Johnson C. Smith, he did move in with Joshua, and they did seem, actually … happy.
Oh it was pretty impossible not to like Nonso, he was a walking feel-good African smile, festive in his dashikis and kofi hat, spewing naïve declarations of love and friendship (“If you love Joshua, then I have to, sister, love you. You are already very much my so very good friend!”). But Dorrie didn’t relent for a long time.
Nonso, she surmised, having scammed Josh for money back in Nigeria, was now over here to clean him out completely. When Nonso went back to visit his folks, with money given to him by Josh, Dorrie predicted he wouldn’t come back. But he did, and on his own dime. It may have started as a Nigerian online scam—Dorrie refused to believe otherwise—but clearly Nonso decided Josh was the (relatively) rich white man for him. Dorrie was hard on Josh throughout, comparing Nonso’s importation to some kind of late-in-the-game slavery operation; when Nonso flew back from Lagos and they met him at Douglas International, Dorrie asked, “So, how was your Middle Passage?”
Snide, snarky, full of invective and rants … at some point she heard and saw herself and remedied the situation by a retreat into her own career and life, which, by the way, had been languishing. The women who ran their website service had sunk into conventional lesbian drama—breakups, an office love triangle, a counselor-conciliator brought in, mandatory sessions were required of everyone, all to make sure the employees could “support” and “nurture” each other, When I hear you say you can’t work with T.J. what I’m hearing is that you still feel hurt and wish to communicate your pain back to Mare, that your personhood is not being respected, blah blah blah. Working there had passed through tiresome and landed smack into torturous.
There was an assistant curator opening at Charlotte’s Afro-American Cultural Center which was being refashioned as the Harvey Gantt Center, named for the accomplished black architect and mayor of Charlotte, the two-time Democratic standard-bearer nominated to run against the Devil himself, Senator Jesse Helms. The Gantt Center was part of the uptown renaissance, near the new branch of the Mint and the Bechtler, in a dazzling new building by the Freelon Group, the go-to architects for high-end African-American cultural projects. It was time to get in the forefront of things she cared about, so she applied for the job and she needed some letters of recommendation. Jerene Johnston, as an art trustee, would be a good recommender. It had been a year since she’d laid eyes on her fantasy sugar mama.
Jerene was still Dorrie’s ideal. Exuding will, she was a distillation of rich-white-lady force who could eat her social inferiors for hors d’oeuvres and probably took no notice of anyone younger or anyone black, let alone younger and black and gay. Yes ma’am, Dorrie marveled, the upkeep it took to be Mrs. J. To speak like she did, hold herself with that carriage, to look like she went to bed and got up the next morning with every hair in place, makeup perfect. Dorrie was doing well to wipe the sleep out of her eyes. Tank tops or T-shirts, no bra (and not much need for one), worn-through jeans, everything loose and comfortable, ratty Converse sneakers, hair cut close to the scalp not for politics’ sake but for convenience. But just imagine such an unfashionable jeans-and-T-shirt tomboy forcing Mrs. J. to the bed in her pearls and fashionable Burberry trench coat, clutching that Kate Spade purse, Dorrie removing one suede pump after the other and throwing them across the room. And just what do you presume to do, young lady? Mrs. J. would ask. Would Jerene Johnston suddenly fear she was dealing with some ghetto-girl banger who was going to take her purse and her credit cards? Hell no. Mrs. J. could stare down a drug lord of a Colombian cartel. She’d know what Dorrie had in mind, the day Dorrie followed her up to her plush, rich-lady’s bedroom. I’m gonna rock your world, Mrs. J. If you haven’t had an orgasm to date, prepare to have one because you’re not getting out of this bed until I make it happen. And Mrs. Johnston in this oft-returned-to fantasy would fix Dorrie with that squinty, steely look and ever so slightly relinquish some of that power, relax her grip on the reins, and say, All right. But it better be a good one. I’ve got to be uptown at the new Mint in three hours.
What needled Dorrie was that the Jerene-fantasy was not absolutely one hundred percent remotely out of the range of things that happen in this world! Dorrie had been with enough older, charming, dazzling white society women—all married, married, married—to know that there were certain women, long out of the bedroom-business thanks to age-dwindled husbands, women who were susceptible, curious, maybe always bisexual but deprived of appropriate circumstances and venues for it to find expression. And when Dorrie was on her game, really, who could resist her?
Jerene surpised Dorrie with an earnest hug, and they adjourned to the conference room at the Mint Museum. Some ancient white docent, not a hundred pounds, brought in a silver tea service.
“How’s Mr. Johnston doing?” Dorrie dutifully asked first.
“He’s out of the wheelchair, which pleases him. Using a walker now, sometimes just the cane.”
In 2009, Jerene and Duke moved away from atop Providence Road and rented a unit in an upper-middle-class condo development Annie found, on the south edge of Charlotte. It was one of those lavish two-hundred-unit housing tracts that bankrupted their owners in the downturn. Where once investors hoped to make $450,000 a unit, they were settling for $220,000, and then, more desperate still, they started renting the units. Annie, who would go bankrupt herself later in the year, smelled a bargain and directed her parents to rent a place until they knew their next move. Dorrie and Josh went out there once. It was
a ghost development, three-quarters of the units unsold, no cars in driveways, no lights on in windows. They had bulldozed away an old-growth Piedmont forest and an ecologically valuable stretch of what is known as Piedmont Prairie; in place of that, each unit had a spindly just-planted sapling, and the entrance drive boasted a line of the so-common-as-to-be-vulgar Bradford pear trees, none of the landscaping well attended or groomed. It never stopped looking just built. Josh described it as like being in one of those evacuated Chernobyl towns—all it needed was a loudspeaker playing staticky Russian martial music echoing between the empty condo units. Three weeks later, Duke Johnston had a stroke, paralyzing the left side of his body and slurring his speech.
“And his speech,” Jerene reported brightly, “is a lot better. We can understand what he says most of the time. What is not better is the depression. We still are trying to find a medicine that won’t knock him out, sleeping away each day.”
Dorrie smiled sympathetically, a little surprised at Jerene’s frankness. She couldn’t imagine Duke Johnston so reduced and unhappy. Dorrie always thought of Annie as the ultimate daddy’s girl, exhibit A for the Elektra complex. But soon after his stroke, Annie cleared out for Berkeley, getting in the master’s-doctorate program there in History. Dorrie decided that Annie couldn’t stand to see her father debilitated so she just removed herself geographically. Dorrie didn’t quite judge her for it, because she didn’t want to see Duke Johnston that way either.
Dorrie asked after Bo and Kate.
Jerene was brisk. “Same as ever. Bo is running for something, Clerk of the Office of the Presbyterian General Assembly, something like that. Spending a lot of time in Kentucky. Kate’s still in Honduras, serving the heathens or some such.”
Dorrie knew they lived apart. “Well,” Dorrie said, enjoying her cup of tea, feeling civilized again, “I’d like to see Kate sometime when she passes back through on a visit.”
“I don’t think she’ll be coming back,” Jerene said without inflection.
Jerene set down her teacup and began quizzing Dorrie on her new duties if she were to be curator at the Gantt Center. Did she hear about the acquisition of drawings on paper by Romare Bearden, the most nationally famous of Charlotte-born artists, whose works were in the Mint as well as the Gantt Center? Was the Gantt Center up to providing a room that could preserve the drawings regarding heat, humidity, mold, the elements? But also Henry Ossawa Tanner—had she investigated where and when some work might still be acquired for the Hewitt Collection? Dorrie realized that Jerene knew an astonishing amount about art but her angle was purchase, scheduling exhibitions, negotiating the loan of paintings, restoration, preservation … Dorrie had been a little naïve to think that curating would be like a great big art history exam, all about appreciation and understanding the art. The museum world was not the academic world. She parried Jerene’s questions the best she could, and she correctly saw this as Jerene preparing her for that first interview, going through a checklist on what she had better get up to speed. Jerene wrote the recommendation letter. Jerene made phone calls. Jerene, Dorrie was to hear later, showed up at the Gantt Center as a Founder’s Circle contributor, making a $2,000 gift. Had that helped Dorrie? Dorrie did get the job.
When she called Jerene to thank her, she got Duke Johnston on the phone. He was very hard to understand. “It’d be luff-ully to see … you … again, my dear…” Duke was short of breath, and his voice had dropped to a lower register, but the worst of it was the sense of ragged exhaustion; it was an old man’s voice, not the buttery Southern baritone of old.
And then two more years passed by. Dorrie had flourished in the assistant curator’s job, and after her dynamic boss and mentor moved on to a cultural center in Anacostia, Dorrie was made one of the head honcho curators. The Center loved her and she loved the Center.
As an added bonus, she got to host evenings and galas and fund-raisers, and got on the circuit for other arts fund-raisers too—frolicking in a well-chummed sea of rich, powerful white ladies. She didn’t even bother with the long con anymore, the incremental seductions—she was a known Charlotte cultural quantity, was becoming a “character” people talked about, the out-lesbian Dorrie Jourdain. She swooped down upon heiresses and matriarchs, wealthy widows and silver-spooned spinsters, aggressive and flirtatious, and when she didn’t get a phone number or an assignation, she often got a contribution. Probably made these married old girls feel risqué and modern, writing a check with the sassy black lesbian leaning into them, a little close for hetero comfort—cheap thrills. And for every ten women she charmingly scared off, she got one or two who were curious, who arranged for a lunch date, who were slowly putting themselves into position for Dorrie to take charge and drag them the rest of the way over the line. Who knew so many white wealthy women could be curious about a butch (but with makeup, a softening touch here and there) dark-skinned black woman?
It was Barack Obama’s fault. Every white lady in town wanted to vouchsafe to Dorrie that, yes, she really really did vote for Mr. Obama. It almost made up for the monstrous, hysterical backlash of birth certificates and Islamo-Kenyan conspiracies and the Fox News–yokel uprising that shut down the man’s presidency before it began.
Hell, she cried too, when he got sworn in. And North Carolina, of Jesse Helms fame, in the electoral college went for Obama! Man, did she ever lose a bet with Annie (who never collected on it); Dorrie didn’t think the country would elect a black man. Look what the New South done up and did. Like her mama said, “George W. made such a darn fool mess of things that a white war hero couldn’t even beat a black man.” Best analysis of the Election of 2008 that she’d ever heard. She wondered if Jerene voted for John McCain and Sarah Palin. Dorrie decided that Palin would be a Jerene deal breaker—she represented a change of national tone worse than what Obama threatened, so she bet that the Republican former city councilman’s wife voted for Obama, too.
As the years passed, she wondered a lot about how Jerene was doing but that didn’t quite translate into calling or seeking her out for a visit. She saw Josh once a month and, if it was evening, that meant Nonso would be in tow (damn, he was getting more queeny and swishy each passing day), so she often proposed lunch when Nonso was at classes. Josh was getting older but letting it show; gray at the sides and in the beard stubble, thinning hair. He used to go on for hours about how he was off to Hair Club for Men if the thinning got any worse, but he didn’t seem to care now. Someone loved him just as he was. And Dorrie, exhaling, finally let herself feel happy for him.
And then, one autumn night, October 2012, there was the phone call. It was Jerene. Would Dorrie be so good as to do her a favor?
“Sure,” she said, still indebted for the recommendation letter. “I can get Josh along too, if you like.”
“No, just you will do. I’d like to discuss something with you. But there’s also a chore. I need you to pick up Gaston, my brother, at Douglas Airport.”
“I’m sure I’m free, Mrs. Johnston.”
“What did we agree to last time?” Dorrie wasn’t sure what she meant, it had been two years since she had last seen Josh’s mother. “You’re to call me ‘Jerene.’ We’re colleagues in the Charlotte art scene now.”
“Okay. Jerene.” Dorrie wondered why Gaston couldn’t take a taxi home. She knew in his final touching-bottom descent he had gotten a second DUI from the police and his license had been taken away. Just as the Charlottetowne Country Club had revoked his membership for some terrible public behavior.
“And I’d appreciate it,” Jerene added, “if you could come straightaway here, no stopping at bars or ABC stores.”
Ah, that was the rub, thought Dorrie. Bring him back sober.
So, she went to the airport where Gaston Jarvis’s evening flight from New York would land, he having left Zurich last night. But as for the soberness, that plane had already flown. Mr. Jarvis had been drunk when he got on the plane, drank heartily throughout the flight from his first-class perch, passed out fr
om the expensive wine and the sleeping pills he had taken, and when they couldn’t rouse him after everyone had deplaned, just as they were about to call an ambulance, he stirred and stumbled to his feet.
Dorrie, who had gone to meet him, saw at once he was red-faced and drunk. Otherwise, he must have got healthy for some length of time: he was fifty pounds thinner, sleek, if jaundiced, in the face, his clothes looked good on him. Jerene called out, “Mr. Jarvis!”
“Do … do I know you?”
“It’s Dorrie, Josh’s friend? Mrs.—uh, Jerene asked me to come get you tonight. I was at Christmas Dinner with you about four years ago.”
“Don’t remember,” he mumbled. “You’re not the woman that … no, you’re not.”
It flashed through Dorrie’s mind that maybe he thought she was one of his alleged escort-service girls. Not gettin’ in the stream, she almost mumbled aloud.
They plodded to the Baggage Claim. “Are those your bags?”
They were. The last two left in the carousel. He took the small one and Dorrie understood that it was for her to lift the heavy one. They went outside to the curb of the terminal. Dorrie had parked some distance away and she could see that Mr. Jarvis wouldn’t make the journey, so she advised him to sit right here on this nice little bench, sit with his luggage, and she would be by in five minutes with her car.
Gaston muttered, “It’s cold … I’d forgotten North Carolina got cold.”
She went to the deck, paid the parking ticket at the booth and then entered the loop road that would take her by the Domestic Arrivals terminal. She pulled up just in time to see Gaston climb into a taxicab.
“Shit,” she said aloud, having failed her one and only Jerene-mission.
She followed behind the cab, waiting for the turn north on Billy Graham Parkway, but the cab went south, and then turned, and turned again … she was right behind them … and there they came to an ABC store, moments from closing.
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