by Danyel Smith
And people yelled it and clapped, and Eva and her man danced for song after thumping song. Then the DJ said, “This next song goes out to Eva, from Mix,” and it was Keith Sweat’s insistent “I Want Her,” and for Eva there had never been such intense intimacy iced with public appreciation. I want I want I want I want I want her. There had never been such bliss.
When Mix came back in four hours to the clinic, she told him, as he tenderly helped her in the car, that it had been twins. Eva’s movements were small. Once seated, she clenched everything. She hoped his clutch was fixed. She wasn’t in the mood for a jolt.
“Twins?” Mix walked around back of the car, got in the driver’s seat. He put his hands in the air, fists clenched, winner-and-still-champion. “That’s my super sperm.”
In her Lost City bathroom, a chill rolled through Eva’s body. Skin rose in bumps. She leaned her face deep in the marble basin and retched over and over.
Whatever was still in her, Eva wanted out.
At a bit past seven-thirty, Eva picked up a brown woven bag packed before she’d dressed. In it was her passport; glutinous, glass-bottled oil of coconut; a boar-bristled hairbrush; ginger lip gloss; and four fat fashion magazines. She wanted to lie by the pool before the hotel’s throng emerged at around nine, before her convention mates descended, bloated and burping postmidnight antics.
No I didn’t fuck him. Yes I sucked his dick.
They won’t impeach Clinton.
Somebody stole my weed right from my goddamn purse.
Look, if my boy does the remix, it’s fifty up front plus points.
Snoop did the dog thing already. DMX doesn’t know that?
If OJ. did it, he should go on TV, admit it. Fuck everybody’s head up with the double jeopardy.
Don’t know why I didn’t send promo CDs down to the Million Woman March.
Get off ‘Pac’s dick. He’s dead. For real. Get with the new.
Eva wasn’t in the mood. She was tense, and she had to pee.
The lobby chandelier dripped giant glass tears, was as big as a living room. Her sandals alternately clicked on marble and sunk into red-and-gold carpet. Small potted Christmas trees lit the concierge’s desk. A gardener, who she also recognized as the bartender from Showcase Savoir Faire, sprayed plants with water and with something acrid from a dented metal can.
“Show your teeth,” he said, smile brighter than his eyes.
Eva gave him the courtesy of a glance. She could see the pools and the beach beyond through the lobby’s glass walls. Same old slippers, went a verse she remembered from one of her high schools, same old rice.
Same old glimpse of paradise. Eva didn’t tug at her tiny skirt, a sheer silk orange scarf tied with flourish at one hip, even as she felt the man’s eyes on her ass.
“Eva! Evillene!” Evillene was the name of the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wiz.
Don’t nobody bring me no bad news. That was the witch’s theme song. Words and music by Charlie Smalls, went the mainframe in Eva’s head. Performed originally on Broadway by Mabel King. Show opened 1975. Evillene. People thought Eva didn’t mind the tag.
As cheerfully as she could, Eva called out, “Hey, ladies.” But she skirted the trio of older radio women curved over a clutch of lipstick-stained cups. Eva didn’t have it in her to rehash the showcase. She barely had it in her to get to the family pool. It was called Ripples, but the water sat platter flat. Eva was still queasy.
But at least she was lying in real sun. As the pool filled with kids, Eva looked at them and couldn’t imagine being responsible for one of them not drowning. She sat on the pool steps just as she’d sat in the pool closest to the lobby the afternoon before, except the afternoon before she’d been talking to her convention mates and talking to her assistant back in New York on her tiny cell phone. Eva had been drinking vanilla rum and listening to a Latin jazz band. Eva had been jovial yesterday afternoon. Yesterday she’d been thirteen days late for her period.
Today she was thinking about family, so she watched a man of about forty-five rub suntan lotion into his wife’s arms. He wasn’t a part of the second annual Vince the Voice Urban Music Takes Over the World: International Marketing for the Millennium convention. The man rubbed lotion into his wife’s arms from where the short sleeves of her tee ended to the backs and palms of her hands. He tucked in a towel around her legs, from hip to toe, and fixed an umbrella so his wife was in the most possible shade.
Damn. How sweet.
Then the man walked around to the deep side of the pool and cannonballed in. He swam underwater until he got back to the shallow, then floated on his back, his hairy belly rising from the water like a giant coconut.
Eva eased herself down another step, so the water buoyed her breasts. She noticed a wheelchair by the wife’s chaise. And then Eva saw that the woman’s hand rested on her terry-covered thigh like a dead bird. That the woman’s sapphire ring twinkled like a living eye in the sunlight.
The woman looked at Eva, and Eva didn’t look away. The husband sighed loudly and got out of the water. He’d been talking to his teenage daughter, who was lolling on a blue raft, staring up at the blue sky, which was the brightest blue possible, the only blue that mattered, even in battle with the bottle-blue pool water, the teal blue of the sea, and the blue of the daughter’s bathing suit, which was dyed the hostile kind of turquoise blue that only a sixteen-year-old Miamian with a springy body would wear.
The man walked over to his wife. His chubby body gleamed bronze, and water ran from his red trunks and pasted down the hairs on his legs. He reached in a sodden pocket and then did something to his wife’s face that Eva couldn’t see. His arm moved roughly. The wife’s bird hand twitched.
The husband stepped from in front of her, and Eva saw him twist a cap back on something. The wife pressed and rubbed her lips together; it was that white zinc stuff, and it was all around the outside of her mouth. The husband leaned over and made the ointment sit perfectly on her lips. Like maybe another time they could have been going out and the zinc could have been lipstick he fixed for her and she would’ve been wearing shoes bare enough to be sexy but comfortable enough to dance in. The wife smiled at her husband in a grateful way, and the blue daughter looked at her father like she hated him, like he was an asshole.
Then the man moved his wife’s hands the tiniest millimeter. Adjusted whatever discomfort the twitch might have caused. Eva baldly stared. She tightened her bladder, overwhelmed by the tenderness. Eva gulped back a sharp desire to care and be cared for. Then pee leaked from her body. It warmed the tepid water around her hips green. The daughter looked into Eva’s eyes, then rolled off her raft, paddled to the other side, and clutched the pool’s edge, disgusted.
Stiff and embarrassed, Eva rose from the steps and gathered her things. She felt even more queasy. Her body was out of control and rebelling in response to rotten treatment. Telling her it was tired and not to be counted on for its usual behavior. The family at the pool had come all the way from someplace else, had wheeled Mom out, folded and unfolded the wheelchair, got to and from airports. And then the husband had hauled himself from the pool to fix up his wife. Eva wiped at herself with a towel like she was contaminated.
He didn’t have to do any of that. He didn’t have to be here.
Eva felt dead to the world. Felt like she’d done too much, sold too much, been touched too much.
She lay back on the plastic slats of the lounge chair, unfastened her bikini top, and left the stretchy triangles covering half her breasts.
No show. No thrill. Sunlight was like the force of voices bearing down on her.
It’s my right to do what I’ve done. Thank God it’s my right because I didn’t want those kids. Wasn’t ready. Ain’t ready now. It’s my body. I get that. I want the decision to be mine. But, shit: I want candy. I want certain people to fall off the Manhattan Bridge. Just because you can do something, just because it’s legal, doesn’t make the shit all right. I’m not trying to overturn t
he law, but I hate freedom sometimes. Free to abort. Free to put out bitch-ho-kill records. Free to put out corny records. Free to lie. People’s parents free to break out on kids already here. I’m free to weasel fools out of their dough. And you and me are free to be you and me.
Eva wanted a tall bottle of water. She wished she still smoked cigarettes. I am so burned. Cuticles ragged, polish chipped. Haven’t combed or curled my hair. Have on a cheap leather bracelet with a stupid sunrise-sunset design. Eva thought of an old country song:
Single girl…
She goes to the store and buys.
Married girl…
She rocks the cradle and cries.
Single girl…
She’s going where she please.
Married girl…
A baby on her knees.
From the twenties, Eva thought. They were crooning that in the goddamn 1920s. And I don’t care what anyone says, or what money girls have, the shit is still the same right now.
She had her hand on her flat belly.
I got to be able to get up and go when I’m ready to get up and go.
A light palm that communicates, and checks, and protects.
“Eva! You incognito?” Sunny plopped down next to Eva at Ripples. “You look fucked up.”
“Sick is what I am,” Eva said. Her hand moved easily from her belly to her side. “Faded.”
“Say it: still drunk. So am I.” Sun leaned back in her chair, pleased for the moment with decisions made, with conquering performance, with morning heat on her face. Starting her own label was vanity, and a strategic pledge of allegiance to Sebastian. There’d been stacks of papers to sign, and an office space on a quiet floor of Roadshow’s modest building in which to move furniture. Sunny wanted Eva to work at Sonrisa/Roadshow, needed Eva to sign artists and build it into something important. It had been her plan to shock Eva, though. Manipulating a melodrama in which Eva was the fool made Sunny feel strong and wise. “When I first got in this business,” Sunny said, “somebody told me there were two bad ways it could go. Said women either get fat because of all the free food, or turn into alcoholics because of the free liquor—”
“Why didn’t you say something?” Impatient with the new self-reliant Sunny, Eva wanted to slap back her star’s shine. “To me, about Sonrisa.”
Sunny shrugged. “Thought Hawk would’ve told. Or Ron. That’s your man.”
“Ron knew?” Eva said this dumbly. She didn’t have it together enough to bite back.
Sun shook her head. “You actually like Ron,” she said. “Why? He’s smart, God knows. But he’s an ass.”
“You should have signed with him back in Carmel, then,” Eva said. “Asses get the job done.”
“He seemed to know everybody.” Sunny shrugged again, her default gesture. “Seemed like a good guide for all this.”
“And then here comes effervescent Eva.”
“Yeah. My savior!” Sun put her arms straight in front and clapped her palms hard. Eva thought of a trained seal. “That night in Carmel—” Sunny hugged herself with the memory. “You, me, and Dart were gonna go to the movies. I wanted to stay at the hotel, soak in that giant tub.”
“So me and Dart left.” The story’s old Eva thought. And been told.
“Ron beeped me, though,” Sunny said, dropping new info casually, “talking about meeting them in the lobby—”
“Who’s ‘them’?” Any other time, Eva would have hidden her ignorance of the details. Figured out a way to let Sunny fill her in.
“You don’t know? It was him and Hawk,” Sunny said. She focused on the middle distance like she could see her beginnings there in 3-D. “They wanted to buy me a drink. ‘Just come down,’ Ron was saying. ‘They got mineral water by the bucket.’” Sunny looked directly at Eva, and spoke dreamily. “You’d been so nice that day, though. Talking to me about my style, what I was trying to do. Talked about your mom. Listened when I told you about Wheatley, why I like her poems, why I wanted to name an album after her. Plus, you and Dart got along. You got us those rooms … at that place … by the ocean. I was curious, though—”
“I want to know what Ron was saying.”
Sun got matter-of-fact. “That you were dope, but you didn’t have the connections he has. That he has relationships with everybody—from the CEO of This to the CEO of That, to the guys who pay the PDs to program the songs at the big radio stations. Even the truck drivers who get the CDs to the stores.”
Eva reached for her water. Sounds like him.
“He said that what I could really count on you for—”
“—was I’d fuck who I had to, to make your shit hit.” And what? He says that to me. Though he knows sex don’t work quid pro quo. It’s a stupid way to even try and do business. Sex is for … depends on who’s it’s with, what sex is for. “You’re telling me this now, why?”
Sun wasn’t surprised by Eva’s knowledge, but by her candor. It softened Sunny, momentarily. “Ron talks about you behind your back.”
“If I started x-ing out people for talking about me, I’d be talking to no one at all.” I talk bad about him, too.
“Hawk didn’t defend you,” Sunny said. She was hardened and hopeful again, about presenting a scenario Eva hadn’t considered.
“He was supposed to?”
“Yeah he was supposed to, Eva. Jesus. For five seconds you sounded like a human being—”
“As opposed to?” Eva liked her rhyme—supposed to and opposed to.
“A bitter bitch.” Sunny said this without smiling and without looking at Eva.
“You like that bitch when she’s riding for you.”
“You got me clocked, Evey.” Sun faced Eva now. “Feel like you know me. What’s funny is I thought I was going to love you like a sister. And you knew it. But it’s cool. I’m not stupid anymore.”
Eva didn’t like to hear Sun call herself stupid. She didn’t like it when any woman said that about herself. “You weren’t stupid, Sun.” You were innocent.
“Maybe not stupid. But new enough to fall for old tricks.” Sunny began to taunt. “I didn’t see back then how you know so much about everyone. Know each and every move people make. What their agendas are. You know the game ‘cause you’ve been in the game. Whatever anyone does was already seen by you from a mile away. That night in Carmel, I thought you had more of a good spirit.”
Eva tilted the bottle back, took gulps of cold water. “A guide for all this doesn’t usually come with a good spirit.”
“You didn’t guide me to Sonrisa. I asked Ron and Seb and them for their little input. But don’t get it twisted—I did Sonrisa.”
“Their little input.” Eva chuckled, angry.
“Because even a little from you is negative. In terms of real stuff. Beyond the next single. The next video.”
“I’m negative,” Eva said like she was noting the nature of characters in a skit. “And you’re funny.” Eva said funny like she was saying not worth this conversation.
“I was real funny when I mentioned Sonrisa to you like six months ago. Remember what I said? Remember what you said?”
Eva took more slow swallows of water. She’d no recollection.
Sun lifted her feet from the lounge chair and placed them on the smooth cement. She leaned toward the associate general manager of Roadshow and spoke like she was spitting. “You said, Eva, for me to concentrate on the here and now. Said to keep my eye on the ball and the future would take care of itself. You told me to write the arrangements for the cover songs. I hate covers. I hate this album. If it sells twenty million, I hate this album.”
“No,” Eva said, unfazed. “You won’t.”
“It was you who told me that, a long time ago, anyway. You told me in Carmel.”
“Told you what?”
Sunny bloomed cool red. She wanted to know Eva better, to trust her more, and to team up. Sun didn’t have many girls from which to choose her friends, and she had the celebrity craving to be near those who’d known her
when she wasn’t. “Told me to choose liquor, Eva. Go onstage fat, you said, and people are disgusted. Go onstage drunk, and people stay to see what you’re gonna do.” Sunny was angry with Eva and she was empathetic and Sunny wanted to shake her.
Eva was about to say, And I was right, but her cell rang. It was Eva’s assistant, Piper.
“It’s Eva,” she answered. Then she said, as if they hadn’t been arguing, “Sun, give me just a minute, please.”
Sun placed her feet back on the lounge.
“There’s other stuff,” Piper said through the phone, “but on the personal tip, your mom called. Oh, and your girl Pritz called. Said she was in transit and would find you.”
Stepmom. “What else?” Eva got up from her chair, walked fifteen paces from Sunny. Eva was hotter than the morning sun would have her, and she felt a little vertigo.
“Just interoffice,” Piper said, chirpy as usual, and officious as Eva required. “Except, are you still coming here tomorrow? Your ticket says to L.A., but Seb was saying—”
So it’s “Seb” now. “Sebastian don’t know my plans. I’ll call you tonight with those. Tell me how it’s moving with Sonrisa. Sunny have everything she needs?”
“I’m, um, I’m not working on that.”
“But you know about it.”
Beat. “Yeah.”
Eva said, “Do I know about it?”
“It … seems like you do. You’re asking me about it.”
“Did I know yesterday?”
“I don’t know,” Piper said.
“Did you know yesterday?”
“I knew a little bit. I—”
“Did I know a little bit? Yesterday?”
“I thought you—”
“What did you think?” Eva was pissed, and wondered if she was truly pissed or just absolutely sure that she ought to be. If there were instincts at play that she could override. The doubt made her angrier. The doubt was new.
“Why’re you mad?” Piper whined. “I know I’m supposed to tell you everything that happens—”