Love Me Back

by Merritt Tierce

  I bet I know what you’re here for, I say to the handler as I come out of the wine cellar. The camera?

  He says Yes, I don’t know how I forgot it, it was a big night for us.

  Yes, I say, it’s a fine-looking piece of equipment.

  When that magazine article comes out later and it says the Bishop, just back from a trip to Africa, and the Professor met in this city and found some common ground after years of unfriendliness, and when I show Calvin the part in the article that says this alliance forging began over a long dinner at a steakhouse, we talk about how we know it was that night. You brought that, I tell Calvin, it was your energy, they felt it, they couldn’t help but love each other. He doesn’t disagree but he hangs his head and his mouth gets tight and he crosses his arms, which is something he does when he’s pissed, and he says And look how we treated them with that fucking business, it’s shameful. I never brought any shame to this place and they putting it on me like that, it just ain’t right.

  What’s this we? I say. You had nothing to do with it. They don’t know we didn’t know whose camera it was, but even if they think it was hate no way do they think you knew anything about it. It’s not on you.

  Don’t matter, he says, it’s all the same. Everything’s on everybody.

  So where I’m going with this is the phone call I took today. They used to come in, the Bishop and the handler, every few weeks, and I didn’t see them for months after all that. If I thought about it now and then I hoped I was just missing them on my days off but today the handler called to cancel the Bishop’s birthday party in The Private Room, which had been reserved for the purpose ever since the day after his birthday party in The Private Room last year. I didn’t ask why they wanted to cancel. I said Thank you sir, even though I didn’t know what I was thanking him for. Then I said And please give our best to the Bishop—hope to see you both here again before long. We’ve missed you.

  All right, he said. You the little girl gave me back the camera?

  Yes sir, I said.

  Thought so. I recognized your voice. You tell Danny he’ll never have the Bishop’s business again in this life, and he’s a sick motherfucker, may God forgive me for cursing a man who has no shame. No shame.

  Yes sir, I said. I’m sorry, sir. Take care.

  I hung up the phone and my neck was hot and it was very quiet in the office.

  The fourth and last night in Mexico your father and I drink horchata, sitting on rough-cut logs around a fire. Everyone else has gone to bed after our final worship service, which was held here by the fire. We sang hymns and devotionals and all the stars were out. It is the first time I have seen the Milky Way and I look and look and look.

  We stay there as the fire dies, talking. It gets colder and colder so your father goes inside to get his sleeping bag. We wear it around us like a shawl. We keep expecting the youth minister to come looking for us and make us go to bed but he doesn’t. I don’t think I’ll ever be warm again, I say. Your father says Come on, Snowflake. Let’s go inside.

  Our group has been staying in the church of our host congregation, sleeping on the floor in our sleeping bags. I think he means we will go inside and go to bed, I in the fellowship hall where the girls are and he in the classroom with the boys. But when we enter the church he leads us down the short hallway to the kitchen. Past the kitchen is a door with a picture of a woman kneeling at an altar, praying.

  My teeth are chattering as we enter what seems to have been a closet or a pantry before it was converted to a tiny prayer room. On the shelves are books and hymnals and Bibles. On the floor is a velvet cushion to kneel or sit on, in front of a small table. There are rocks and dried flowers and a small bowl of rice on the table, among other offerings.

  We can see only because of the dim filtered starlight coming from the hall; there are no windows. He lights the candles and then closes the door to the hall. He takes the sleeping bag from around my shoulders and quickly zips it back into the shape of a sleeping bag, while stepping out of his boots. Take off your shoes, he whispers. I take them off and put them next to his. The room is only a foot or two longer than the sleeping bag, and not much wider. He pulls back a corner of the sleeping bag and motions for me to get in. He moves the velvet cushion to the top of the sleeping bag, and waits for me to get settled, my head on the makeshift pillow. Then he gets into the sleeping bag too, and zips it up all the way. Hey little Spoon, he says, embracing me. I have never felt so whole, or safe, or known since.

  This should warm you up fast, he says. Body heat.

  He kisses my neck.

  Did you follow me through the gateway, into the blizzard? I whisper.

  Yes, Aviendha of the Aiel, he says, playing along. We have both been reading Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series.

  I roll over, on top of him. Rand al’Thor, I say into his neck. What’s your plan for getting us back?

  I don’t have one, he says.

  We wake together when we hear noise in the kitchen on the other side of the wall. He looks at his watch. Six forty-seven, he whispers. Hurry.

  We fumble quietly out of the sleeping bag. I put on my shoes and kiss him and put my ear to the door. I don’t hear my whole life being written for me inside my body, cell by cell.

  I burn my neck with a fondue skewer while you watch The Cosby Show on my bed. You are watching all two hundred episodes for the second time. You refer to the episodes by sweaters: the one where Vanessa wore the black sweater with the yellow cars. Sondra’s flower sweater episode. The skewer is sharp but I don’t use the prongs. I turn on the gas burner and hold the metal rod over the blue flicker until the plastic handle begins to feel warm in my fingers and the prongs turn red, devilish. I wait for the laugh track because I know the skin will make a popping crackling sound I don’t want you to hear but it would most likely go unnoticed anyway. It would sound like a normal cooking sound. I press the metal rod in hard and let up after a count of three. I put it in the dishwasher, small shreds of skin stuck to it.

  It hurts but it feels good. I mean it feels like relief. The pain is real and synchronizes all the pain in the rest of my self that I cannot manage to organize. Draws it up to my neck and tells it what it is: You are pain, this is what you feel like.

  When you ask about the greenish bubbled stripe that appears across the hollow of my clavicular notch I say I think a bug bit me.

  You ask to touch it and you are fascinated by how the blister feels full but fragile. You say it’s gross but you want to do it again. You are skeptical. You say I should go to the doctor. You say What kind of bug would do that?

  We can’t have pets in my apartment so we put together a jigsaw puzzle of a Saint Bernard on the floor in the hall. You name him Barry, after the legendary Alpine rescue dog. You buy a bag of dog food with your own money and leave bowls of food and water next to him. I hear you apologize to him once when you accidentally step on his tail.

  You tell me you have decided you are not going to have children when you grow up. You are going to live in an RV, which you call a house car. You will have two dogs and it will just be the three of you, traveling everywhere with the windows down. You tell me Barry will be too old to go with you. You whisper so his feelings aren’t hurt. You ask me if I will take care of him when you leave home and I say I will.

  Calvin D. Colson

  Cal is a hustler. Maybe he’s a type, maybe he’s all over Chicago or Atlanta or some other bluesy black place like Memphis, where he’s from originally. But his stuff works in Dallas because there’s a lot more space around a black man striving here than in those other places. He was king at The Restaurant. First thing he ever said to me was What are you doing crossing the guest like that. Don’t ever cross the guest. I was new to The Restaurant and fine dining both, I was serving someone’s salad with the wrong hand on the wrong side. I cared about him from that instant. Wanted to please him, got Velcroed to his there’s a right way to do this. That was when The Restaurant was my life, when it was all I h
ad, when I’d run away from her. I’d sleep till nine or ten, one big meal before the shift with the paper or a book. Alone, most always alone.

  To do a good job at a table you have to care. Whatever show you’re doing, wherever else your mind is, you have to put a twist of real on the very end of it. The people are waiting for that and if you don’t pull it out they know and they don’t like it. Cal did care, or at least he did that show better than anyone. Something in the way he leaned over people, touched their backs even though you’re not supposed to do that, it was like they were in his home and he’d say Now what you want to do is put that first bite together with all of it, get you a little tomato, a little that purple onion, and the thing that brings it all together is get you a piece of that basil. Rub it around in that basalmic—mm! Mm. Tell me bout that.

  He said a lot of words that way, slightly off. Mama gon kick me to the curve if we touch, he’d say to me as we messed around on my floor in the afternoon. He had a bank job in addition to The Restaurant, something one of his highrollers made up for him. What he did there was try to look lively in a beautiful suit. Something from Bachrach. He could wear any color and he could put stripes and checks and prints together and it would work because he was puffed up inside it like he was born to win. What I want to know is was that real.

  In that restaurant all of us were off. Chipped. Everybody on the way to the curve. Maybe it’s the same in a law firm, a nail salon, whatever high or low. Maybe that’s just what it is to be alive, you’ve got that broken sooty piece of something lodged inside you making you veer left.

  Calvin was profiled in a local newspaper when they did a piece on great Texas steakhouses. “Mr. Colson provides what he calls an ‘old-school’ dining experience, part service, part performance, and all professional. Ask for him at The Restaurant or you’ll miss out on what fine dining ought to be,” the reviewer said. Lissandri gave him a Rolex for that. If you read up on our level of service you’ll find all kinds of uptight lists about not engaging with the guests, don’t say your name, don’t try to get call parties, don’t push anything on the menu over anything else, be formal and anonymous and perfect. Cal broke all those rules and people tipped him outrageous sums for it.

  One night one of his call parties didn’t come through for him, this German-American guy Konstantin who brought in big business clients and left Cal somewhere between fifty and eighty percent on tabs that were never less than five hundred and could push up on four grand depending on how many guys he had with him and what he wanted out of them. On this particular night Konstantin was distracted or drunk when he signed the credit card voucher and tipped Cal $300 on $1,620, a figure that any one of us would have called a good night. Cal called it cheap and called it to Konstantin’s face.

  See, anybody else would have been fired for that. If a guest says to you Did we take care of you? after paying the bill the only possible answer is an effusive Yes, thank you for asking. Doesn’t matter if they didn’t. Like it doesn’t matter if they’ve been sitting there for two hours after the dishwasher left for the night, if they say Are we keeping you? the only possible answer is Oh no, sir, the place is yours.

  Cal went up to Konstantin in the lobby where he was still working these Japanese guys, trying to get them all in cabs to the strip club, and made it clear he needed to talk to him immediately, and when Konstantin said What’s up, my brother? Cal pulled him aside and opened the check presenter like he found a turd in it and showed it to Konstantin and said What is this?

  Konstantin went all meek and said Oh did I fuck up? And Cal said I don’t know Kon you tell me, but usually I see something closer to what I’m worth on this line. Is that what you think I was worth tonight? Something you weren’t happy with? Because it seemed like all your guys had a great time and it seemed like they was going the way you wanted em to.

  I’m not sure how he got Konstantin to think that the multimillion-dollar deal he had just closed succeeded in part because of Cal’s excellent service but Konstantin rescribbled the tip in as $900 and said to Cal Is that more like it? I’m sorry, my man, I didn’t mean anything by it. You know you’re my guy here. And Cal had the audacity to shake his hand and say stiffly, still trying to be cold, That’s what I thought but I was about to have to let somebody else be your guy here and Konstantin said I feel you, we straight?

  You should have seen Nic Martinez doing his impression of Konstantin later in the parking lot. A Mexican doing a German trying to be black. Nic took a puff of Cal’s one-hitter and passed it to Cal and then put his hand on Cal’s biceps and said I feel you Cal my man my brotha my nigg we straight? You my homey right? You vant a couple more bills? You vant me to lick your nuts? and then he was laughing so hard, so crazy, he was leaning over in front of Cal, still holding on to his arm and coughing from the big hit he was trying to hold in and say at the same time Teach me how to get my own German, massa! Teach me!

  Cal was holding up straight, letting a smile stay in his cheeks but looking at his pipe all serious, knocking the cache out, reloading. I know he knew his muscle was popping out strong with Nic hanging on him like that and he took pride in that and pride in his balls-out way with “his people,” as he called his call parties. Ain’t nothing to teach, he said to Nic, just got to be you and bring it.

  He looked bronze with the streetlight shining on him, reflecting off his white undershirt. He looked the same color as Nic but he was really a goldish cinnamon. He said he was ochre, terra-cotta, and sepia, colors a former girlfriend, a painter, gave him. He liked that. He was always painting himself for me.

  I mean did he really feel that way about himself though—the way he made it look in the bank suit, the way he made it look with Nic hanging on him. Where was the nugget you couldn’t massage or change or put a pinstripe on and was it that confident. Was that kernel whole and well or was it sad, smacked out, lost. I don’t know but I think a showman is all show. There’s no secret—or there is, and that’s it. Like when I asked Danny if that scotch rep Alyssa’s tits were real and he said Yeah they’re real—real fake.

  Cal would have a little taste, as he called it, near the end of the shift when nobody was looking, a taste of Grand Marnier neat. Danny didn’t care as long as the guests didn’t see and Danny was usually drinking with him anyway. Cal’s taste would become two or three tastes and then he would get so frisky, he would start touching all the women—servers, guests, the pastry chef—like you trail your hand through cattails out on a skiff. Pleased, enjoying the weather, nature.

  One night after a few tastes he sat down with Doc Melton’s woman—Doc wasn’t there, and Doc was one of his big men, the ones who kept him on a sick and regular payroll of inflated gratuities at The Restaurant and threw in extras like Mavs tickets. Cal sat down with Cassandra Melton and he told me all about how he felt her up under the table, his fingers on her pussy lips, how fluffed and slick they were and how she sat into it delicately. He did this and after she and her girlfriends left, after he kissed her on each cheek, he came over to me and Danny where we were doing tequila shots at the corner of the bar. He was flying. Oh my Gawd, he said touching his fingers to his lips, that pussy. I can’t believe I haven’t been getting none of that. Why don’t you Cal, I asked, why don’t you just take it, always complaining about how long it’s been since somebody took care of you at home. Fuck knows it’s on offer for you everywhere you go.

  No, he said. Can’t do that. I’ll touch me some titties and some pussy but I won’t do that. Cal, that is such bullshit, I said, and he said You just say that because you want me to cross over. I do want you to cross over, I said, but it’s still bull.

  That was the summer Cal would come over to my apartment after he got off from the bank, before we had to be in at The Restaurant. Those were warm afternoons, my apartment toasting the Texas sun through big old perfect windows. I moved into that place when I saw the money I was making at The Restaurant. I bought that car too. You can make good money—high fives if you really push, low sixes
if you’re Cal—but you never lose the feeling that it’s fragile, your connection to the money. That place I lived in after I first got that connection, it was small and expensive but it was clean and bright and everything was nice. The carpet was thick and new and Cal and I would scuffle on it every afternoon. His kisses. His face—so soft—Your face! I’d say—I take care of myself, Mami, it’s what you got to do he’d murmur—his lips hot, fresh.

  That much he allowed. But even if he was stripped down, his suit draped carefully across the back of the loveseat, his white V-neck undershirt tucked into his white boxer briefs, he wouldn’t allow me to touch him. I reached and he said No, don’t do that. We can’t. Mama gon kick me to the curve, I might as well move in.

  Okay, I said, move in. I’m ready.

  You not ready. You don’t know. Why you always want more.

  You want it too.

  I do. No doubt. But you think we ought to touch outside of our want?

  He was forty-four and I was twenty-two but he was in better shape. His waist as trim as mine, his pecs tortoiseshells, his quads modeling those boxer briefs. Before The Restaurant he used to train the Highland Park moms at Gold’s. He still got up at four every day to do his reps—pushups, crunches, curls—before his daughter woke, then he’d make breakfast and take her to school. That was his time with her. Home late, never to bed before two or three in the morning, the office afternoon would fall on him like a tree. Him in that bank chair, sleeping upright in that suit.

  So his excuse for coming over was he needed a nap. Only once did we actually nap—or he did, sleeping clean and gentle in his whites. I lay behind him, my hand on his thigh, breathing in the warm buttery smell of his neck, afraid to move, afraid to sleep and miss his sleeping in my arms, as if he were a comet, an eclipse, a papal visit. Not just a man pausing on me, a bead in his rosary.