by Danyel Smith
Eva shook her head at her rhyme.
No one.
On bad days, she thought there was nothing worse than a white person who was rich due to rap, and who walked like he or she’d earned a right to be in hip hop. But on worse days, when Eva dealt with dilettantes of any color, she appreciated any person who had some experience, however skewed, with creative people not used to being loved by the masses, or to having money. Eva knew who Ron was. She knew what Rons were. Eva had known the deal when she saw Ronald Littlejohn in the amphitheater. And she’d thought he was sexy as hell.
“You know who I am,” Ron said, “and you like me, so let’s be back in the bed.”
“Go on, Ron Lil’ John. I’m going out. Me and Giada.”
“Giada is a snake,” Ron said before he stepped out, but before the door closed he walked back in, gently pushed Eva flat, drench-kissed her, and then spoke directly to her mouth. “Gonna put my dick right here,” he said.
“Dream about it.”
“Already have,” he said with a hitch-up of his jeans. Then Ron wiped her chin and mouth with his palm, and he was gone.
Showered and scented, Eva stood on the sidewalk in front of the small lobby. It was a little after 1:00 a.m. Lois from Trix stood by. All the taxicabs were Benzes. Giada flagged one.
“Where’s your crew?” Eva asked Lois.
“About theirs.”
“Why you ain’t about yours?”
The cab pulled up and they got in the back. “I’m trying to be,” Lois said. She surprised Eva by naming a club to the driver, and as he pulled off, Lois said, “I didn’t know you and Lil’ John were down like that.”
“He’s all right.”
“You don’t work for that white boy, yet you threw that stuff up, fools went crazy. More fights could’ve happened. Already two dummies hurt. You get blinded by the hype. I thought that’s what we artists were supposed to do.”
Giada watched the driver.
Eva felt reprimanded. “They got hurt before I threw those flyers out.”
“Whatever,” Lois said. “Just more money for Lil’ John and Min.”
Giada looked at Lois and said, “Does the money come out of your purse?”
Eva was glad the cab came to a stop. Once in the cavernous club, Giada located tall chairs for Eva and Lois, walked away, and then brought three cups of wine.
“Don’t like red,” Lois said.
“G.’s off the clock, Lois. And she wasn’t your slave when she was on it.” She was mine.
Giada motioned like she needed the ladies’ room, and Eva followed her. Once in the minuscule booth. Giada pulled out a cigarette, slit the paper with her thumbnail, and emptied the tobacco into a small plastic bag with weed crumbs and coke dust in one corner. Giada shook her mixture around, and then poured some of it into her own paper. Giada used the cigarette filter—hooked up the cavvy completely, then lit it with a lighter old and heavy enough to have belonged to an ancestor. Flame blazed up three inches.
They smoked.
Giada said, “Your lips are making me happy.”
“Why?” Eva blew smoke. She tilted her head a bit. She knew what came next.
“I just like. The shape.”
Someone knocked on the door.
“Glad you approve,” Eva said. She waved back the cavvy, done.
Giada leaned a few inches. There was another knock on the door.
Giada smells good. This bathroom smells clean like bleach.
“I heard,” Giada said, “you were … out there. Down for … whatever.”
“Finish what you started, if that’s how you’re feeling.”
Someone knocked again, louder and longer. Neither girl was bothered.
“In this situation, I’d rather the other person … begin.”
“So, what? So there’s no confusion later about you having pressured me? What are you, a dude? It’s not that deep, Giada. You brought me back here.”
“To smoke.”
“Bullshit,” Eva said, smiling. She was happy. She’d just been with Ron, she was a little high, she was in a random, cool Italian club, and now homegirl was in her face. “What, you just want to frustrate me?”
“Lucky Eva. With your teasing. Her new friend Giada is all that frustrates her.”
“Oh we’re friends now.” Eva did like Giada’s personality.
“I guess. So we might as well dance.”
Lois was pouting at the table when they returned. She was snapping, “Where were you guys?” when they pulled her onto the strobelit dance floor.
Giada, Lois, and Eva danced together like they were friends, like there was no crack-of-dawn wake-up call pending, like the DJ’s every mix was hypersonic. She got Bette Davis eyes and Cel-e-brate good times and She’s just a girl who claims that I am the one and finally, right before the DJ yelled, Va la sede ed ha sesso, ibridi it was Let’s sway through the crowd to an empty space.
Go home and have sex, mongrels. The three girls were a sweaty mess. They held hands on the street in fast friendship, each high and happy, each one’s heart still on gallop from the music and movement, each elated with her swiftly rising rank in the music business, each with the belief that she was special, culled from the masses for service in a flawed but righteous battle for world supremacy. The three girls stood closely in the last darkness, starving for food and sleep, until another Benz scooped them and dropped them at the hotel.
“So you gonna go on up to your room,” Lois said, “let Lil’ John smack it up and flip it. Rub it down.”
Eva laughed.
“After the tour,” Lois said with real worry, “he’ll see you and he’ll be very Hi and Bye.”
“And I’ll be what? Crying? Stalking his ass?” Eva laughed more, kissed Lois on the lips, and Giada, too, and went up to shower again, and to push her stuff in her new Louis Vuitton duffel. The room seemed bigger, was balmy, and smelled like sweat and his ‘n’ hers colognes. The room and everything in it was discrete from her, already monument to a significant event.
Over the rest of the tour, and for years afterward, Giada never said anything to Eva about Eva’s relationship with Lil’ John. Giada’s silence on the subject, and her remote loyalty to Eva, cemented a sporadic, long-distance acquaintance that would last until Giada got in the middle of some shit that was not her business, and changed Eva’s life in a way Eva had been terrified to imagine.
NIGHT TWO
Eva lay belly down across a Ravenna hotel bed in a striped thong, wondering how her ass cheeks looked from behind. Wondering if the strip of transparent ivory bra across her back made her electromagnetic. Eva pulled her knees up under her hips. Ron stood behind her, still in layers of clothes and the mingled scents of his day.
Why you nekkid?
Trying to get fucked?
Trying to get into trouble?
What’s on your mind, today?
Belt unbuckled. His pants hung right above the knees. Ron pulled her by where femurs fit hip bones, pulled her ass to where he could push in and a little bit up. Her shoulders on unironed sheets. Right jaw down. Lips relaxed, soft, slightly twisted, seemed as exaggerated as her cheeks in the air. Plumper. Accessible. She pictured herself an invitation, a warm, tight party of his dreams. Of course the power shit gets played out—consciously and subconsciously. Who does anyone think we are except 1992 man and woman, black and white, and American all over? Of course the power games appeal and most times satisfy. Of course I’m defensive, here in my own mind, never to anyone else. Of course I worry if I’m getting all exoticized and objectified and all the shit I should worry about. And I know the field isn’t level, but I worry, if I exoticize him. His being a cool-ass white boy floats my boat. But isn’t that what sex is, anyway? What’s your freakiness? Who’s on top?
They fucked, then napped, and then fucked until the wake-up call.
NIGHT THREE
Frankie, didn’t I tell you, The lion would come in for a kill/
Frankie, didn’t I say, I
t had power over your sweet skill.
—“FRANKIE’S FIRST AFFAIR,” music by Sade Adu and
Stuart Matthewman, lyrics by by Sade Adu
Eva had her nose near Ron’s armpit. They were in Florence. FIRENZE, the signs all said.
What white boy smells like sandalwood gambler’s soap and Murray & Lanman Florida Water? So damn Puerto Rican. So damn Caribbean. Jesus, he wants to be black.
They both had the off-hours of the artists, usually from one to about eight in the morning. This morning, Eva and Ron had until noon, and they lingered over red orange juice and yogurt and sweet bread. They listened to music from saucer-size speakers Ron attached to his Walkman. Eva felt inhaled by him, intoxicated by his intoxication with her. She felt soft and like her flesh might burst through her skin, like her sleepiness was her sexiness. Like her sexiness was her strength.
“No one is that perfect person,” Eva said, under cover of stale quilts and orangey darkness. “Everyone melts down to who they are.”
“Truuue.”
“No one stays new, or infatuated or infatuating,” she said close to his ear. “No one stays awake twenty-five hours a day being wonderful and smelling like tea tree oil.”
“I can smell like tea tree, bay rum, Vandi Kananga, Hoyt’s, whatever you need, twenty-four seven, three-sixty-five.” His fingertips were on her rib cage. He moved them up to her breast, pinched her nipple to right before it hurt.
She bit his earlobe—“Listen”—to right before it hurt. I can resist this fool. He don’t have me like that. Eva spoke so her lips brushed his auricle with every word. “No man is unintimidated by real conversation from a woman.”
Ron tensed but didn’t move his ear away.
“Especially if she’s a girl who really works—”
“Get out my ear.” But he didn’t move.
Eva clutched his dick tightly. Ron crunched his eyes shut. His dick had been in her hand all along.
“—and takes care of herself a girl who’s strong and weak.” Everyone melts down, and some, to nothing. I melt down to a clenched belly and wet eyes and they run. Cosign on that, baby boy.
“No one’s the sun the moon the stars the sky,” he said. “I get that. Not so hard, baby. Let him go so he can do his thing.”
Eva squeezed harder, kissed his ear so sweet.
“Let go,” Ron said, from some raw place between ache and elation.
“No one’s rock-solid—”
“You think you run this? That’s what it is. You think you run this.” He smiled hysterically at the pain. He choked out little laughs.
“—and emotional at the same time.”
“No one,” Ron said, “but me.” His turn to get in her ear. “So spread your legs and put daddy’s dick where it belongs. You like holding it so much, put it where it fucking goes.”
They never walked together like lovers. She adored this understanding between them. Eva and Ron operated super-separately—to make phone calls, deal with venues, handle their groups. They traveled with their own, both of them easily managing the daily detachment from the other, both busy, both certain that those who cared to know, knew and shut up, at least around them. Eva and Ron didn’t speak of the sex, or whatever feeling they had, with anyone on the European continent. They were both self-consciously and randomly attentive, but Eva and Ron acted like the colleagues they were.
In the Firenze room, Ron said into Eva’s hair, “Why do you let me have sex with you without a condom?”
It was such a valid question, she blanked for a second. “Why are you doing it?”
“It’s … warmer,” he said. “More real.”
“Consequences are more real.”
“I know,” he said gravely, like he’d considered the penalties and was puzzled. “I’m trying to figure out, though, why I don’t feel careless.”
Before they got lost in it, Eva pulled his face back by his hair, “Negro,” she said to him, “you need to put a condom on.” She said it so that at a future date, she’d be able to say she’d been wiser than he.
“I’m your negro now?” He was pleased and tried mightily not to seem so. Ron jerked his hair from her grip and kept on stroking.
“You need to—”
“I’m not gonna come in you.” He wanted her to shut up, to feel him, to let him feel her and what she’d said.
After, they fell in and out of sleep with the music on low. I can’t go a day without my sunshine and the Five Blind Boys of Alabama and I only want to see you walking in the purple rain. Right before they had to go to work, Ron was too tired for more sex and Eva was too sore, so they made elaborate bargains, negotiated who was going to do what sexual trick to whom the next time, and for how long. They tested each other with threats of exposure to their tour mates, threats never to be made good on, threats to check that the casually silly reaction of the other hadn’t changed.
NIGHT EIGHT
In Modena, after a tense, sold-out show at Parco Novi Sad, and an after-party at which they’d both baldly flirted with other people, Ron and Eva were both about four drinks in, and they were exhausted. What had become the PeaceLove&Money spectacular was a success. More people, more press, more fights than they’d anticipated. Lois’s Trix upped their profile to the tenth power. Imperial Court was as they always were—fanatically received, but barely gold even after the international dates and bitter about it. Peace and Love kept to themselves when they weren’t thrilling crowds. They explored vineyards and museos, chapels and ancient clock towers. Peace and Love spent hours talking to their lawyers back in the States. Money Min had hooked up with a writer from Blues & Soul magazine.
The tour was almost over. Ron and Eva were in Eva’s room at the Holiday Inn.
“How old are you, anyway?’
“Twenty-six,” Eva said. If it’s your business.
“I’m twenty-eight.”
“And?”
“I wanted to know.” Ron loved Eva’s lips and ass and legs and the way she dressed to show it all off, and he hated that other people wanted to have her, talk to her, make deals with her. They knew she’d fuck them, too, with barely a preamble. Eva was loose as a goose, but he liked her personality and her work ethic. He thought she was smark and slick. He liked the way she touched his face, the way she sucked his dick like she liked it, not like it was an afterthought or a chore. So he felt stupid and was furious in her room at the Holiday Inn, but drunk enough to try and explain himself, and to press her for anything that would make him feel smarter.
Silence and drinking and facing each other on a tiny balcony.
“You ever give in?”
“To what?” she said.
“Anything. Anybody, I mean.”
“I give in to you.” With an angry, sexy smile. Fuck you and the eager Italian witches with their wack-ass singing group and their halter-tops they don’t even have the boobs for.
“No.”
“I do.”
“You let me do what I want to you,” said Ron Lil’ John.
“Let you do what you want with me.”
Ron was supposed to be someone to have had sex with, to have stopped having sex with, someone to think about with small sadness when it was over. And when it was over, Eva figured she’d wonder, like she usually did about men that lasted more than a week, why it hadn’t evolved into a relationship, and then she’d decide that it had to be because in her heart of hearts she didn’t want a relationship, because she felt that if she did want one, she’d have it.
“I’m talking about, like, show your secrets,” Ron said. “Act your real fuckin’ self.”
“You know my secrets.” As if. So you could do what you want with them—my mom. Dad. Other boys. The clinics? No.
“Listen to me!” Drunk.
“Keep talking that loud,” Eva said. “See how far you get.”
“Listen to me. Sometimes, I feel like I could—”
“Could what?”
“Submit to you,” he said.
; “Submit? For what? Sexually?” Eva was slurring her words.
“Whatever, just make it like you were important. Like you were worthy.”
“Nigga, I am worthy.” I am. I am. Yes I am. Yes I am. Yes I am.
“Comebacks. That’s all you have. Never give in.”
“So I give in, then you do.” That’s the game suddenly? I’ve played it. Lost. Learned. It ain’t my tourney, white boy.
“Tit for tat. That’s what you play.”
“Give to get. Tit for tat. It’s not a game. It’s the game.” And so don’t hate the player, sweetheart. Do not hate me ‘cause I play as good as you.
DAY ELEVEN
“There were cute guys there, right, Ron? And cute girls?” Eva was talking about the party celebrating the last tour date. They’d held hands in public. Had sex in an anteroom while the guys from Imperial Court banged on the door, yelling drunkenly for Eva and Ron to open up. “You niggas ain’t shit,” they said. “We can hear you!”
There in a room at Milan’s Hotel Principe, Ron nodded dumbly. Purple candles had melted into tonguelike shapes. Eva was sitting on his chest in a blue bra and nothing else, and he was on his back in gray boxers and nothing else, and they hadn’t had sex, but he’d held her and hugged her and gone down on her twice, and no, she hadn’t had an orgasm, but all that was right there for the morning when they had to make things happen quick because there were flights to catch back to the States. Between them, he and Eva had had three bottles of champagne and various other cocktails.