Speaking of Summer

by Kalisha Buckhanon

  I was giddy, and expectant. I’m sure he only needed his memory jogged, as I did. When he recalled Summer, he could tell me more about her: whom she sold paintings to, partied with, and went home with. He’d know where they all lived, or could be found. I was so stupid to concentrate on searching Manhattan alone.

  Mounds of records filled his living room. A small eat-in kitchen faced a brick wall. A makeshift studio of turntables, a soundboard, and several guitars posed in the opposite section of the apartment. He separated himself a bedroom with sheets. One had a peace sign. The two rooms were neat, with scented candles and two ceiling fans spiraling madly into a quiver I thought would turn to a crash. When he started his music, I forgot them. He left it to me to uncork and pour the wine. He served me on plastic yellow plates. While night fell I caught up to all Raymond reminded me of me, interred in the marked grave of my past life: my newbie New Yorker penchant for all black, night owl days spent in bed, Hed Kandi nights spent in bars, summer breezes on blankets in Brooklyn parks where hard bread sopped up Brie and hummus and our chopsticks poked snips of tuna from in between tight sushi rolls.

  Oh yes, I am eating meat now . . . I was anemic.

  When I knew him most and best, I held dreams of a different life, a new whirlpool, to flush all the shine off the goody two-shoes I wore all my life. I met many people, they did not scour to know who I was before, they thought I was talented, they were just as interested in my plans as my jokes, and we coexisted with millions across bridges and tunnels but somehow found each other in the same rooms to talk to. Then, we went our separate ways unless a reason to make more plans arose. New York was not a place of random visiting for anyone but the natives. The rest of us needed an occasion, a party, or an exchange. I had all four with Raymond Fanucci.

  We filled up on our Chinese food buffet. A second bottle of wine opened over the plastic cartons scattered across the top of the table. I was forward about it, so he played “Black girl” music: a house mix peppered with Sade, Kelis, and Rihanna. We eased to his couch with egg rolls in greasy hands. It was the most I had eaten in at least a few weeks. We spoke our fortunes: Those grapes you cannot taste are always sour. Try everything once, even the things you don’t think you’ll like. A well-aimed spear is worth three. He never said “Italy.” He called it “my country.” He told me he would take me to meet his friends, his New York familia, in Little Italy tomorrow. I laughed at how he thought I’d be around tomorrow. We both confirmed what we suspected: “No, I no longer do art.”

  Then, at the time I would have joined the graveyard shifters on a walk to the bodega and unnecessary purchases through a bulletproof walk-up window, Raymond went to his kitchen for what I thought would be sweets for dessert. I heard the rumbles and bumps of blocks of meat and packages in his freezer. He came back with a chilly plastic bag. He dusted a flat saucer on the table with the white powder inside. He breathed it up with short brown straws I normally stirred my coffee with. He scooted me to it next, in his place. I followed, just once. I bent down and sniffed like a bad smoker who wastes half the cigarette. Control. Raymond bent down four or five times. He stood up more excited each time. His hands tore off pieces of egg foo young he stuffed in his mouth. He picked up pints of fried rice to pop straight in his mouth with no utensils. He drank wine from the bottle.

  He was on top of me on the couch. I pinched between my legs from more than the tampon I knew was inside. Somewhere in my galloping thoughts, this wad of cotton was insurance against going the whole way. But my shirt lifted above my head. His did too, and maybe I helped him undo my jeans button to slip my pants off. And I told him we could not, because it was that time. He saw the blood on his fingers but did not care. He put my legs around him to pick me up, pushed aside sheets hanging from the wall, and dropped me on top of his two stacked queen-size mattresses, and pushed in and out while I cried out from far too much inside me at once.

  TWENTY

  I smelled coffee and bacon, but I did not wake up. I heard the door close on the dark rooms with no sunlight past the curtains, in August. I listened to salsa from across the hall, maybe from a room below. Still I did not move. The door opened again, and a strip of light from the kitchen crossed half the apartment. I kept my eyes closed. I heard plates slide around in the kitchen. A microwave slammed before it beeped and whirled and beeped again. I smelled grease and brown sauce. I pressed my face into the pillow. The television came on. I heard them say Sandra Bland, suicide, protests. I slipped away again.

  I dreamed of a mob in white coats and fast shoes, outside Raymond’s window.

  I startled up past one o’clock in the afternoon, according to a dusty digital clock perched on a bathroom towel rack, just one tip or brush necessary for it to fall into a sink of water I had my hands in. I could have been shocked to death. I’d gotten here half asleep. I moved it to the end of the rack near the wall. My clothes were somewhere in the apartment, still dark, with my old friend open-mouthed and shirtless on his couch. He dozed under a fan with dust bunnies coiled throughout its wires. Warmth passed over me when I saw him.

  Raymond would not let anyone take me away.

  That man in Harlem did not know this place.

  In the stained mirror, I saw I was fortunate to have awakened alone. My eyebrows were the only part of my face in place. My first good sleep in weeks, yet my eyes puffed and creased. My swollen lip and nose held a carmine hue. I splashed water in my dried mouth. I pulled back a clear shower curtain to step into Raymond’s small, chipped bathtub. On his windowsill: shampoo, shaving cream, a few razors, and generic shower gel. I used it all. As I shaved my lower legs, I resented a man had seen them so hairy. A first. I saw pink tint to the water on the tub’s floor. I squat down with my left hand steadying me on the windowsill until I could feel the jammed string of the tampon. The borrowed tampon was so flooded by now it plopped out into the rolling water and rushed down the open drain before I could grab it.

  I would have to move around him to find my panties and jeans so I would be able to slip out before he woke up. I saw the top of Raymond’s head over the couch when I opened the door. He was up. Lucky me. Now I had to talk about it. I decided to leave nothing to chance. I took awkwardness by the throat and into my hands.

  “You’ve lost all respect for me, and that’s okay,” I announced.

  My rolled pants indicted me, in front of his couch. I bent down to pick them up. The coffee table was back to the neat compartments I was first impressed by. Raymond flipped his chin up to motion me to him. He grabbed the back of my knees to put my legs between his. He had dictated my body from almost the moment he called me, on a Brooklyn street I never planned to be on. In more prudent circumstances, this would be chemistry. After a night of coke and sex with an all but recent stranger, it was just fair.

  “I have not,” he said to me. “I lose respect for women who know what I want and give it to me anyway. You, I just bump into. Coincidence. I respect a pleasant surprise.”

  “Yeah, right,” I said. “Coincidence indeed. I can’t recall why I came down here.”

  I jumped at a banging on a door so near I thought it was his. He gripped me.

  “Relax,” he smiled. “No boogeyman is here.”

  My body had not felt right for a long time, obviously, since I wound up in the hospital. But this “not right” feeling was more pronounced, as if a layer of thin steel encased the whole inside of my body, with stiff bones under taut skin. I wondered why he assumed I would be so agreeable to snort up. I would go see Asha for a detox tea. She would boil it from twigs and sticks and herbs so I shit until I had nothing left and felt ten pounds lighter, degutted, and restabilized.

  “I always liked you, beautiful,” Raymond said, and my body bridged on top of his for him to kiss my mouth. The blood and wetness between my legs gathered.

  My lips spoke on top of his: “I have a boyfriend.”

  “Oh,” he said, his lips still near mine. “Now I lose all respect for you.”

  I
pulled his hair at the side of his face and he loosened me. I wiped at blood that had slipped down my leg. He had seen it, known of it, and found a way around it anyway.

  “He why you disappeared?”

  “Not only him. I told you what I’m going through.”

  “You do not love him,” he said. “He bore you.”

  “I can’t get dirty again,” I told him.

  To claim a boyfriend, rather than a rebound off one, was some redemption. Then the pall of pity and loneliness dissolved to a gloss of power and choice. I pulled away to take a roll of paper towels off the holder on his kitchen counter, for another makeshift solution to my ill preparation. A fortune cookie rested on the floor, probably spilled while Raymond clamored for his stock. I slit its plastic and cracked it open to a slip that read: The ultimate test of a relationship is to disagree but to hold hands.

  I flipped on whom to apply the statement to: a man I barely knew or the one I thought I did, who left me because he claimed he didn’t know me anymore. It would come in handy to keep this new man if I chose to pursue it. Unless Raymond had fallen so in love with abrupt period sex he would treat me like I was brand-new. I was never a one-night-stand girl, until now. This was a refreshed virginity loss for me. I would leave Bushwick crossed over the threshold of recreational sex with no way to turn back. I resolved to linger for the time it took Raymond to hit the Family Dollar for women’s underwear and box of tampons.

  Two days later, I was still there.

  RAYMOND THOUGHT I STAYED BECAUSE I liked him. I stayed because no one would look for me there. I finally comprehended it was no use to keep peeking through the blinds. He had an iPhone charger that wouldn’t fit my budget Android, so I had an excuse to pretend no one was trying to reach me. God works in mysterious ways.

  We still needed two bottles of wine a night, but takeout of choice crept down to Little Caesars; he worked only part-time, and $40 for mini–Chinese buffets stole his daily bread money. The conversation and messy sex wandered to his front room couch. I slept in still, making brunch for myself as he punched the clock. My options were instant coffee, butter and toast, eggs and browning avocado. I watched news updates about justice for Sandra Bland, now marked by her history of depression and miscarriage and Angry Black Woman Facebook posts, to blame her for her own madness I wouldn’t blame her for. Raymond came home. He snorted more coke. I did not. We talked. Summer came up. Chase did not. His phone rang. He looked at numbers and letters. He answered what sounded like men. I teased him, pressed him, to know her name. He said it was no “her.” He did not ask about my “him.”

  While sequestered safely in a hazy acquaintance’s T-shirts and boxer shorts, I gave him the details: I came home to my apartment after a late evening out, our rooftop door was open, my sister was gone and I went up to look for her, her footprints were on our roof but she was not, I filed a missing person’s report, I haven’t seen her since, and everyone treats me like she just walked away, like she wasn’t missing at all.

  “I cannot imagine you have to go through such a thing,” Raymond told my breasts, which he enjoyed most. “No wonder you just disappeared.”

  “I’ve been so distraught how no one is up in arms about finding her. She didn’t just walk away.”

  “So was this . . . ?”

  He could not say murder. Who could?

  “My sister was happy. She had a temper. She liked to be by herself. But once she got around people, all was well. We had our differences. But, to just leave me?”

  “Sometimes we think we know people, and we don’t. Oh, my poor sweet . . .”

  The risk of it all now, at our ages, was all the concealed and lost baggage we carried on these flights. Still he comforted me the way men knew how or thought was best, and anchored their self-esteem to, and saw as the best carriage to any load on their shoulders. I was unsure if he catered to me because he was a good host or because I was giving him sex: He fixed our plates, washed the dishes, cleared the table, poured the wine, and offered more blow. I shook my head no. I was not ashamed of him or any of this. I was not as afraid the shower curtain would peel back to a butcher knife as I was of how many emails and voicemails I missed, and what I would see in my apartment that a confusing figure claimed no one else ever lived in.

  One more day at Raymond’s and I would have looked homeless and destitute, not carried away and swept off my feet. He did not ask me to leave. I only calculated the length of a long weekend naked or in one outfit, on the spur of the moment, as the tip of an overstayed welcome and sign of a fatal attraction. He offered to walk me to the train—not ride the whole way to Harlem with me. Perhaps I had worn him out, too. Still, the offer would have been nice. Without it, I knew I could wake up one day to a minor pain, like stalled internet, a declined debit card, or dog shit on a flip-flopped toe, and burst into tears of latent humiliation. For now, I wrote my number on Raymond’s skyline calendar still showing April—he had not flipped the pages in months. He bear-hugged me until the train pulled into the elevated station at a weekday rush hour. Other people’s bodies blocked my view of him watching me go away through the glass.

  I was marked in his scent. Raymond had jimmied himself up into my nose hairs to make me self-conscious everybody in the car knew what I had been doing for the last seventy-two hours. For this, I had a new friend once old, a mishap turned experience, and a teardrop of perfume left to bring my own smell back.

  I needed something to do with my hands. Pens and lipstick—fail-safes I felt naked without—and these journals in my purse. I could not remember carrying them with me. I traveled with less pretty ways to take notes. I opened one of them to scribble. The teachers had called this automatic reflex “creative,” the family called it “strange,” the friends called it “artistic,” and the men called it “interesting.”

  A quartet of A-cups and nonexistent waists, robust weaves, and pronounced fingernails came in the door nearest me. The girls soaked the train car in loud gossip and sass about boys it seems they just saw. One of the boys was a punk. Another was sorry. One or another was weak. Maybe all. The friends’ chiseled faces looked at one another square when they dipped their fingers in and out of their whole assortment of crinkly chip bags. I recalled the days when I was not above stinking up a room with Cheetos and Doritos, had no interest in the difference between vegans and paleos, and did not need to think green tea and coffee would speed up my metabolism in lieu of nicotine. My purity rung lowered along with my slightly fallen face, just a bit, as I saw my reflection in smeared windows after the car fell underground in Manhattan. Just another woman in just another car in just another town only bigger than most, but still just another and no different for us in any of them, in America, where the privacy of what made us girls could only be guarded for so long.

  TWENTY-ONE

  I escaped my orange line scam at West Fourth Street for the warranty of the blue. The A train, or, God forbid, the C local, always meant home. No matter the time of day or night, where I was coming from or what had ensnared me there, the sight of a blue circle in the subway could compose me like a sip of wine. The peaks and valleys of Hamilton Heights were just as bony and predictable as I knew them to be. Yet the sky seemed closer. The trees had filled out. I felt shorter than my five foot six, plumper than my 150 pounds. I walked up 149th Street with my head turning back every few addresses. No car was just a car. No footstep only a footstep. The bodega cats, however, were just the bodega cats. I rushed past them. A man on a boy’s bike crossed ahead of me. He kept his eyes on me all the while, him waiting for me or me waiting for him or us not knowing who was waiting for whom, until we intersected at his hip and my bag. He called back, “Yo, sorry, ma.”

  How sweet: a nice one.

  I had to search through several keys—to storage, an old gym lock, and the house on Trummel Lane even—for my penny-colored one to the brownstone’s lever knob. Normally I felt it on the ring in the harmony of the jingle without looking. My stairs appeared straighter befor
e me than they ever had before. Reflections in the hallway’s framed prints obscured their images behind glass, and I had to come close to remind myself what those images were. Maybe Fran and Gregory, or the new neighbors, dusted. I did not smell fried chicken, weed, or Asha’s incense. The climb to the top seemed steep.

  There was no peace sign on the tie-dyed sheet at the rooftop door. It was a star.

  At my door, I tussled with jet lag, if I was behind or ahead of myself. I tried the same keys before the right one let me in. A scent—my body lotions, perfumes, sandalwood incense, Swiffer WetJet pads, and warmed trash—acclimated me back to my space. Along the walls were my bookshelves interspersed with photographs and art and collages. I walked past the kaleidoscope. In the back of the apartment were canvas and cans and supplies stacked like junk, the outline of contents jutting in standoff and imposition. On its other side, my desk, printer, fax machine, and desktop. I tapped the space bar. The machine began to breathe. My screen lit up a window to my inbox, topped in black lines of unread messages. Another window was a classy hotel’s website; its nutmeggy colors inspired me to jot ideas for Mr. Johns’s online branding. The kitchen island counter teemed with crumbs and shreds of cheese, olive oil and vinegar vessels, canisters of brown sugar and oatmeal and flaxseed meal I never set the tops back on. The answering machine blinked orange. The microwave door was open.

  I set my jacket and purse on the counter. I walked to Summer’s bedroom. The bed was weighty and still, with no canopy anymore. I knew it was gone. It was too much maintenance: unlatching, folding, dry cleaning, more latching. I just did not know who had dismantled it, and when.

  The Myth of Sanity lay on the nightstand, atop other books I meant to get through. A We Go On pamphlet was a bookmark inside Night Wind, on my pillow where Chase would have been, for his country and our trip. The bedroom’s fire escape gate was open. I ran to check our closets. I thumped on the floor as I raced to each one with no weapon or defense strategy. I came back to the bedroom out of breath.