by Danyel Smith
This written in hurried, leaning blocks, as if announcing a noon bargain of monkfish, not typed in IBM Selectric, like
FILTERED OCEAN VIEWS FROM NEW “FRENCH” COUNTRY
CHATEAU. CROWNED W/SLATE ROOF & WRAPPED IN
TINTED STUCCO W/STONE TRIM. HIGH-TECH LIGHTING.
FORMAL DINING ROOM. KITCHEN BOASTS GRANITE
COUNTERS, HARDWOOD FLOORS, VIKING STOVE.
BREAKFAST NOOK OVERLOOKS GARDENS W/PATIO &
OUTDOOR STONE FIREPLACE. WARMED BY A STONE-
TRIMMED FIREPLACE & GLEAMING HARDWOOD FLOORS,
LIVING ROOM OPENS TO TILED OCEAN-VIEW DECK.
MASTER SUITE W/FIREPLACE, W/ANTIQUE FRENCH
MARBLE MANTLE ADJACENT TO WINDOW SEAT W/OCEAN
VIEW. MASTER BATH OFFERS SPA W/SPACIOUS SHOWER,
JETTED TUB & LIMESTONE VANITY W/DOUBLE SINKS.
TWO ADDITIONAL BEDROOMS & BATH. OFFICE &
EXERCISE ROOM. $1,998,000.
This suggested a kindly, old-fashioned manner or at least an older way of doing business, suggested a moment in time at which the agent had been on top of all things modern, but had peaked there in Selectricville, happily and retired from newfangledness to quiet, rich Carmel.
Eva read and reread the ad until Dart gently pulled her, but then she stopped in front of a tiny Saks Fifth Avenue, its windows alive with headless ivory mannequins. Eva coveted their creamy satchels. Even before she had money, Eva’d been a brand loyalist. Commercials for places like T.J. Maxx made sense to her: why buy no-class, no-name clothes, when you could just search around a bit and get brand names for less? Eva paused before Saks a long moment, fondling clunky buckles in her brain, visualizing the pride in ownership.
She and Dart sat on a bench on the parklike lane divider. An island-oasis flanked by pristine asphalt rivers. SUVs chugged by sporadically and Eva thought of L.L. Cool J’s “Boomin’ System”—Twelve o’clock at night with your windows down— but the trucks were silent as sentries.
Her cell rang. She flipped it, saw it was Hakeem, flipped it closed.
Big wheels keep on turnin’. That slow part of Tina Turner’s version is what her mind played then.
Sunny’s brother was plump. Puffy like he’d been beaten from within and swollen up. “Don’t feel like a movie,” he said. “Dark enough without going in a darker room.” He sat three feet away from her.
Eva slipped from her shoes, put her soles on the cool cement. It seemed an earthy thing to do, and she thought Dart was one who’d respond well to earthiness. To her surprise, it felt good.
“Tell me about you,” Dart said. “I can tell Sun likes you.”
“Tell me about you.”
“I’m not a musketeer, if that’s what you think.”
“Maybe you are.” She looked at his bloated, grim face, thought how cute he’d be if he lost weight and put on at least a better brand of knockoffs. It was a skill of Eva’s, to envision After through the depths of Before.
Her cell rang again. Eva flipped it, glanced at the caller ID, saw it was Ron, flipped it closed. “You sing, too?”
“Used to, sometimes, with Sun. But I don’t like singing in front of people. Get too worked up. Over the top.”
“Like in church?” Eva was thinking, That could work. Like James Brown? Eddie Levert? Solomon Burke. We could take it black to the future.
“Wears me out. Either kills me or has me on a weird, fake high. For days afterward.”
Eva was silent, still looking for the downside. Brother-sister acts are corny. Who, besides the Carpenters? BeBe & CeCe Winans. The Wilkinsons? That’s father-daughter-son. And bluegrass.
“So you’re a person who can sign her to a record deal,” Dart said. “How do you get that job?”
“By being a slave first,” Eva said, pleased to discuss herself and her experience. She felt solid and smart when she talked about the record business, liked the sound of her words spilling boldly, lush with lingo and knowledge of the real deal. “And answering other people’s phones,” she said. “Eavesdropping. Finagling. Figuring out a way one thing about one act could be done better, then finding a master or mistress who’s lame enough not to take successfully credit for it. Then you either work really hard and have a few more successes, so people realize you need your own slaves, your own budget. Or you work really hard on your game, your ability to talk yourself up as a winner, as an executioner, and then people not only give you your own everything, they kiss your ring as they do it.”
“Which did you do?”
“Both.” And I never lost one minute of sleeping/Worrying ‘bout the way things might have been.
“But you like music.” He was earnest, reaching for common ground.
“Oh, everything,” Eva said in an airy sweep. “Billie Holiday, ‘Singin’ in the Rain,’ Sinatra, Ella, Tina“—Eva slipped Turner in midway, so as not to give away how the song was slicing her brain, the same few lyrics, like serrated knives—”the Temptations, Stevie, the Emotions, Earth, Wind & Fire.” She took a giddy breath and exhaled with a blissful smile. “The Police,” Eva went on, names erupting from her in shaky rhythm, altogether a love poem, a jamming song itself. “Michael Jackson, and of course the Jackson Five. I love L.T.D. and WAR and ELO. Run-D.M.C. and N.W.A. I love the Eagles and the Clash and Hall and Oates. Rob Base and Keith Murray and K-Solo and Special Ed. MC Breed, MC Hammer, Doug E. Fresh. Who else? A Tribe Called Quest. Digital Underground and Tupac. Tupac! Gang Starr, Mary J. Blige, Jodeci, Heavy D. Public Enemy. I love music. Of course.” How do I sound. Like a teenager. Eva wondered if it was manipulation if you were telling the truth.
Her cell rang again. She flipped it, saw it was Hakeem. Pressed the OFF button.
Dart’s face loosened. Lips relaxed into a peaceful pout.
Points, Eva thought. And by accident.
“Why do you love it?” he wanted to know.
“Dude! I just do.”
What a question.
Answer honestly.
“I like to dance,” Eva said, and a small sway took over her upper body. “Get my groove on. Music sends me from plain happiness to pure ecstasy. Loud music, the way it infiltrates my body the way I can feel the bass in me, taking over my heartbeat. When I sing along, and my voice melds with Whitney’s or DJ Quik’s. My voice and their voice like the same. I’m singing what they’re singing, meaning what they’re meaning.”
He is totally feeling my energy.
“And you liked Sunny today.”
“I really did.” Eva’d felt Sunny’s groove through her entire being. “She’s double brand-new.”
Is this real? Am I real Eva thought, or Memorex?
Eva got in the record business to do what she loved. It’s what was said and said and said and said: You will be lucky if you can do for a living what you love to do anyway. It’s the road to happiness.
I am telling the truth right now. To this boy, Dart, I’m saying exact honest truth.
In a gig where you use your passion and love to fuel a business that gambles on the passion and love of people trying to get past broken hearts, trying to put symbols to experiences, and trying to dance until breakfast, people wanting to sit home and play A so they can feel or stop feeling B—you need your damn feelings, your real ones. Because at work it was:
We got to make a song people want to have sex to.
We got to make a song people will have babies by.
The artists were real, but the people who made people into artists were more real. This is what Eva believed.
People can sing and bang drums all they want, but if no one puts shit together, if no one organizes and markets and distributes and promotes the love and the passion, then an artist might as well be your cousin Mariah, second alto in the goddamn choir.
“But,” Dart said hopefully, “Sun’s like from like another time.”
Mmmhmmm. “Yeah,” Eva said, “She reminds me of somebody.”
“Another singer?” Dart was brightening. “Carmen McRae, sometimes. Or Dinah Washing
ton.”
This was what she loved. How could music be work? It was how her life was archived, the key to her pining soul. Sitting there next to D’Artagnan, all sides of Eva were alive, ringing, singing. She thought, There’s nothing new under the sun. A twist on that would be a good album title. His sister has a great name. All kinds of meanings. She sings like she loves it, like she’s desperate to do it. It’s why first albums are always the best, why there are so many one-hit wonders, so many returns to the top after drug-ridden slumps, why so many addicts make great music. What will make this guy like me? He’s a weirdo chubbo with a sad face and idealistic notions. He’s not coming on to me. He loves his sister. His sister loves him. I do like Sunny’s voice. Her look needs to be cleaned up, but she’s pretty and in shape. I need to sign her. Need to do it without Hakeem. And Ron can kiss my ass. People think I’m falling off. I am a little bit. The stuff people bring me doesn’t move me, and the stuff I find on my own is not good enough. I want a star who’s not a rapper. I want to take myself to the next level. I win Dart, I win Sunny. Any fool can see that. Sunny doesn’t sound like anyone but herself. I need to do something. I need Dart to feel something. To feel me.
She slid her feet back into her shoes, looked at him directly. “I like all this.” Tina’s knives had done their work. Eva was herself, cubed. She knew the subliminal game. Eva knew all the games. She could speak in tongues, if she had to.
“Carmel-by-the-Sea, you mean.”
“The whole thing today,” Eva said with a pinch of wistfulness. “Monterey, the water, Sunny’s name, the whole nine.” Her strategy was hazy, but when she had a clear goal, Eva trusted herself to say and do the things that would get her what she wanted. She gladly, easily followed her own lead. This was what confidence felt like.
“Everything’s just … coalesced,” Dart said.
“I lived just south of here,” Eva said, “for a while when I was growing up. It wasn’t like this—” She waved her arm in the direction of the Saks.
“So you’re home.”
“Kind of. It was just a few years, but they were good years—with my mom.”
“You and your mom are close.”
“She died when I was thirteen.” Eva touched her dime-store bangles.
“Wow. So when Sun was singing ‘Imagination,’ that part about ‘The torture is when you see/Something you wish would happen is never gonna be,’ you had to be feeling that. How’d your mom die?”
Eva paused. “The thing is, she killed herself.”
“Damn.” Dart placed his palm near Eva’s thigh, then pulled himself over and erased the distance between them. “Why?”
“Nobody really knows. Not my dad, or anyone. She left me something, just a trinket. But it didn’t explain anything.” Eva was inspired.
“You still have it, what she left you?”
“A bracelet. I lost it. Had, like, this … tiny plaque on just a tin chain. There was a raindrop … a sun, a red leaf, and a snowflake. For the four seasons of life, I guess.”
“A sun. Huh. You were a kid. Don’t stay mad at stuff you can’t control. It’s a slippery slope.”
“You know about that?”
“I know about slippery slopes.” His face closed again. Eva put a hand on his wrist.
Time for a change of venue. Eva said, “I want a drink.”
Within a half hour, in a miniature bar on a side street, Eva and Dart were two of the last four customers. Eva drank Scotch. Saw Dart looking at her with grave interest. With pity. He drank cranberry-grapefruit juice, no ice. He drank three glasses of tap water. Eva was irritated with herself for unwinding at the dark table in his odd, quiet company. His nosy sincerity made her feel half-dressed, and delicate.
When Dart stood up, like, I’m ready, she got up, too, found someone to give money to. On the television above the bar, the Yankees appeared to be playing the Orioles. From near the coatrack at the door, Eva watched until the game went hazy.
Keep your eye, she told herself, on the ball. Keep your mind in the game.
Through the last outs of the last inning, Dart’s hands rested lightly, from behind, on Eva’s hips. Like he knows he needn’t hold me close. Knows I’ll stay. For right now.
More in her head than with her body, Eva pressed back toward him.
With the same, almost imagined weight, Dart’s fingertips pressed on her hips.
Eva pictured his hand inside her. As the Yankees or the Orioles won, as some of the players appeared to shake hands like good sports, as an elfin busboy stripped tables, as Eva waited on change from her c-note, what Eva wanted was to be entirely naked, on her back, Dart neatly licking her. She imagined his tongue dry as sand, smoothing off layers of deadness.
In Eva’s suite overlooking the golf course, a pine fire had been started. Standing near the foot of the bed, Dart grabbed her in a gawky embrace. In her shoes, she was almost as tall as him, so her throat smashed into his pillow of shoulder. Eva wouldn’t have been able to speak, even if she’d known what to say.
When Dart squeezed even more tightly, Eva wriggled free. He peeled off his clothes, faced her in his too-snug briefs, and stared like it was a critical moment in a child’s magical game. But Eva wasn’t enough spellbound to take her turn. The room smelled like Christmas, and Eva stood so close to the fireplace her sweater roasted, smelled like Boer goats on some New Mexican afternoon. Eva had lived there for a short while, when she was in junior high school. This was when hip hop still sounded electronically funky and created by robots. She’d enjoyed her time on Planet Rock. Eva thought back then that she was one to let (as Afrika Bambaataa had advised) her soul lead the way. She ate carne adovada all the time, and anise-seed cookies. Break-danced in front of Mexican boys in dented cowboy hats. They barely moved.
Dart turned to put his stuff on a dresser, and Eva saw that his back was treacherous with red pimples and craters and holes that looked like tiny worms had dug in. There were thick, raised calluses and patches shiny with oil. Colorless, cracked paths crossed over his shoulder blades. She wondered if his back spoke of neglect, or if he was somehow ill.
“It’s my fault,” D’Artagnan said like he was reciting a poem. He plopped down in the deep window seat and faced Eva. “Never rubbed anything back there. I mean, I get clean. But one of those brushes on a stick, I never have one. Guys don’t get that kind of stuff, until they get a real girlfriend.” The back of Dart’s head, his padded shoulder blades, on down to the top of his ass—all faded into the dazzling dark night. He seemed flimsy as a sewing pattern, a glowing outline of something real.
“So, you’re trying to bone,” Eva said. Just don’t turn around on me again, please. I can’t look at your back.
“That’s how you say it?” His eyes resigned as a griever’s.
“How should I?”
“Your lips are puffy.”
“My lips always look like this.”
Eva made up her mind that she was going to play and make him beggy and sweet and a little mad. But Dart was eager. The kind who says, “I’m not gonna come until you tell me to come,” and since he was pounding like a maniac, like he hadn’t fucked in two months or two years, Eva said, “You’re about to come,” and he did, like a switch had been flipped. And when he started up again, and Eva was sore and exhilarated and rubbed raw, she put her tongue in his ear, in a way she thought was devilish.
“You want to come right now?”
Dart climaxed again. His cries like a kitten’s. Dart closed his eyes tight and for longer, Eva thought, than a man needed to.
“What are you doing?” Eva said.
“Paying attention to what’s in my head. The actual, physical ecstasy. I haven’t had it like this in a while.”
“Like what?”
He opened his eyes, rolled off of her, and lay on his side. “Been sick,” he said. “Medication has my body sometimes.” He caught her mute alarm. “Not sick like that.”
“What do you mean, ‘has your body’?” Maybe his back
is a reaction to whatever medication—
“Meds that sharpen the mind and blur the …”
“Dick.” Oh. Those kinda meds.
“Yeah. Lithium.”
Dart said “lithium,” and Eva thought “Lithuania,” which brought to her mind the initials USSR, and notions of an “Iron Curtain,” and torture, and people being kept in a place against their will, and revolutionaries being sent to Siberia, and being lobotomized and left to mumble nonsense while peering blankly through dusty venetian blinds of a mental ward. Eva’s thoughts followed no logical course.
So he’s a little crazy.
“I feel good, though,” Dart said. “Today. Weaning myself off the ’scripts. Started this herbal therapy I try to memorize good feelings so when I go under, I can try to force myself to focus on when I felt good.” He fell back and spoke to the ceiling. “Sometimes I can do it. Sometimes I have no control, no consciousness of good feeling, of anything good, or even knowing how under it I am. I can’t explain … everything’s exaggerated. What sounds like a tinkling bell normally, sounds like a bomb. What looks like a light going on to you, it’s blinding.”
‘So you get sad, still. Even with the … herbs.”
“When I’m feeling like I do today, I know the herbs are about the power of suggestion more than them changing the chemicals in my brain. I like being at least in charge of the suggesting. I don’t like my brain being balanced. To whose specification? Who’s the calibrator?”
She curled next to him for a while, until he shifted so his jaw was across her ribs, his arm across her, and his long fingers tucked tightly under her arm. The jumpy rhythm of Dart’s breathing settled, and the sound of it sent her to an easy sleep.
She slipped out as light was breaking, had coffee and toast in the hotel’s quiet restaurant. We used condoms and everything but he was all up everywhere. Aside from his back, he’s got nice hands and he filled me up. His voice. Loud even when it’s soft. The things he said. Stay with me. That’s right. Please look at me. Look at my face. Why was I so into it? I guess because so little is at stake. Except for with Sunny. But she likes me. Already. She even likes me for her brother.