by Danyel Smith
“Good ol’ me,” Eva said. Now she was tart. “Service with a smile.”
“With an attitude, more like. But you’ve understood.” He pulled her to him. “You always did, in your cold-ass way. Things would be better if I could be … more for you.”
“You’re fine for me.”
“Your expectations are low. I’m fine for you on Cat Island. Here, the spirits are paving our way.”
A pink sun stalked the last lavender shadows and simmered the sea to umpteen shades of green. A breeze teased dangling petals from flowers. Eva and Dart hadn’t moved from the lounge on the patio.
Dart’s hand moved in her, and then touched her where she craved to be touched. Then her belly and brain clenched like a fist and opened like a star. Light, star bright. She saw the last few, in the brightening skies, and started crying. Her leg hurt.
Too many things are happening at the same time.
Dart was tuned into Eva enough—the fingers came out smoothly—to say, “I’m not here to hurt you.”
Eva was inundated. She was wiping out.
“It’s okay,” Dart said. “Be louder. You’re killing yourself.”
It humbled her that someone could know, instinctively, or have cobbled together some psychic memory strong enough to move his finger a certain way, or say a certain thing. Eva wondered how some people knew what to do. Ron’s wide face entered her mind. She pushed at it, and the effort made her face more wet, her neck and ears wet. Every morning second on the patio was Billie Holiday-Solomon Burke fierce with truth. Ringing, and wringing. She’d had orgasms of different kinds with connoisseurs who knew how to make them. But it was Dart’s solemnity that encouraged a sparkly open-sky, light feeling—mind blank, but completely stimulated, a shimmering sheet that shakes and shakes everything out.
“You did good,” Dart said. Eva was ashamed that she took such comfort in his confirmation of her self.
Gold star for me.
“Your arms are so pretty.”
She nodded.
“Your hands are soft like a baby’s.”
“Thank you.”
He put salty body-scented fingers near her mouth. His nails soft and bitten down to the quick. Then more Eva tears at the coziness and affection she hadn’t felt since Italy, on the road with Imperial Court and Trix, and Ron. She thought she could smell Ron in the dawn air as Dart kissed her toes and then tried to put his face inside her. She shrieked, tried to let him in farther, and in a Ron-like move, Dart squeezed Eva’s butt so hard it went beyond pain to pure loveliness to her saying stop and not meaning it.
They lay there in the sunlight, naked, heads opposite, feet near the other’s face.
“Tiny,” Dart said, cradling her feet like they were precious. And Eva got that ecstatic, embarrassed feeling strong women get when any part of them is made to seem delicate.
Eva’s cell rang. It was a long scratch on her vinyl day, but she ran for it.
“It’s Eva,” she said with relief in her voice.
“Ciao! It’s Pritz. Where are you?”
“Where’re you?” Eva made herself sound enthusiastic. She had to for Giada.
“In Miami, about to come where you are. I’m fired. Paid out and happy.”
“Fired. Damn, Giada.” In 1998, to get fired in the record business was no big deal. If you were in urban music, and if you’d branded yourself—with an evocative nickname like Dutch Dillinger, or World Wyde, or Punch Villa—you’d be hired someplace else, even within the same conglomerate, quickly. And even without a nickname, you could misuse your expense account, set cherry bombs off in your office as part of a professional meltdown, or beat a coworker’s ass, and your prospects were still passable, if not enhanced, as long as you’d kicked a rapper’s or R & B singer’s sales high up the charts. So there was no need for empathy from Eva. In fact, she envied Giada—now known as “Pritz,” after the character of Maerose Prizzi as portrayed by Anjelica Huston in Prizzi’s Honor—for her vacation between gigs. “I’m far,” Eva lied. “I’ll be in Miami probably tomorrow.”
“Then we’ll come back together. Tell me where you are staying.”
“Are you with—”
“I saw Leetle John and Sun and Hakeem and your whole crew. Now tell me, where are you?”
“Why’re you pressing me?” We’re friends, but we’re not friends.
“Why is it a secret? I know you are with Sunny’s brother.”
“I’m fine.”
“No one said different.”
“I’m on Cat Island. That’s only for you to know.”
“Okay. You sound bad. I will be there, probably … maybe by noon tomorrow.
No! “It’s after noon now, Pritz. There’s no way—”
“I know what time it is, Eva. I have been to the Biminis. I have been to Turks and Caicos. I know where is Cat Island, what it is to get there. Two baby planes from Miami. Easy. I will call you from their airport.”
“Pritz! Don’t.”
“Ciao.”
Eva hurried to the bathroom and threw up.
CHAPTER 16
1992
Eva didn’t want to call Ron, so she did what was easy. She went to a place she knew he’d be: Thursday nights at Mr. Kato’s, in Beverly Hills. A schmantzy Japanese place that smelled like scallion and pineapple, like just-Windexed lacquer, and colognes with names like Escape and Spellbound.
On Thursday nights, record industry people who worked urban acts flocked to Mr. Kato’s to expense dinners for ten. They got rowdy and waved colleagues over. The place didn’t take reservations, even for large parties—the key was to get to Kato’s early enough to snag a prime, secluded-but-still-visible table, but to get there not so early that you looked like a desperado.
The place was extra hectic on this particular Thursday because so much was going on in Los Angeles. Eva was in town for two awards shows, three new-talent showcases, and a series of meetings with her Los Angeles coworkers about cross-promoting the West Coast leg of a tour for the least possible label money. She walked into Kato’s at 8:45, feet free of New York socks and boots, body bare of sweaters and hats. Eva had dressed carefully. It was new for her, an attempt at what she figured to be sophistication. In addition to her new style goals was the fact that Ron had only seen her in road clothes, her hair always snatched back in a ponytail. In the few short months since Italy, Eva’d used the money and confidence that came with yet another promotion (Trix had two platinum singles; Imperial Court had gone platinum in the United Kingdom) to patronize the chic boutiques on New York’s Madison Avenue. Because she’d perused oversize catalogs from boutique department stores, read them like guides to foreign countries, Eva felt briefed—if not fluent—when she walked the hospital-like, minimalist floors.
Eva was looking for a way to be. Even before Italy, she’d jocked the few black female vice presidents and senior vice presidents in the industry, and she invited them to quiet lunches. If the dining was outdoors, or in the East, or if the senior vice presidential woman had gone to Wesleyan or Brown, the woman lit a Marlboro Light (it was a Newport if the woman had gone to Hampton or Howard or tended to fall back on or take pride in formerly or diffused ghetto ways). The cig usually accompanied a shared apple tart and a third vodka gimlet, and a spiel from the woman about how people hated her for her accomplishments, and about the ongoing remodel of the place in Sag Harbor. Eva was mostly in awe of the fortyish women who went back in the music business to before hip hop started. Women who’d worked the last L.A. days of Motown, who’d been down with Prince on his ascent, who’d slaved at the labels to which powerhouses like Bootsy and Earth, Wind & Fire and Parliament Funkadelic had been signed. Once tipsy on admiration and alcohol, these rare women—some austere, some flamboyant—gladly schooled Eva in the ways of getting shit done and the clothes to wear while slogging through it. Motherless Eva soaked up their habits like a sponge.
Three months before the big night at Mr. Kato’s, Eva met with Meri Heath, a woman she’d nickn
amed Ms. Exception. Ms. Exception’s pumps were usually French, not because French shoes were so much more expensive than Italian or Spanish, but because French shoes were so much more distinctive. Singularity, attitude, panache—the currency of style. That’s what Ms. Exception often told Eva.
Ms. Exception was a general manager, and she managed not just the business of urban music, but the business of white music, as well—hence her moniker. Ms. Exception headed up a label Eva’s competed with. She told Eva of Eva’s impending promotion on their cocktail date, which was two days before Eva’s promotion was announced, so Eva’s perception of Ms. Exception as an all-seeing goddess among music professionals was etched in stone.
Ms. Exception talked about a lot of things that evening, and talked around alliances made long ago in boardrooms and bedrooms with men and women now in positions to keep her in her venerated position even when her profits were so off they made the business page of the New York Times. Ms. Exception talked about her son at the second-rate private college in Maine, talked about how spoiled her child was, and about how the spoiling was done now, and so what was the use crying about it. Ms. Exception told Eva straight-out that it was the white women in this business who needed to be watched. Ms. Exception told Eva that so many of the white women in the music business were pathological in their quest for black men, yet protective of their position with white men, that white women would fight you—secretly, while smiling in your face, while overcomplimenting you on your hair—with the kind of bucketing intensity associated with typhoons.
Eva was pulled into these tales—especially the next ones, because they were the ones Ms. Exception told with face tight and lips thin around her Newport, her words pungent and smooth as the medicine Ms. Exception felt she was delivering:
“Negroes are the ones who’ll stab you in the back soon as you turn it. They’ll talk love and tell their boys how they laid you. They walk into a place of business, my place of business, with their basketball jerseys swinging like dresses around their knees. With guns in their belts, or the rumor of guns. They walk in with their knowledge of da streets, of what’s hot. They swagger in, wowing the whites with a stupid, a fake, narrow, supposedly black authenticity. They walk in with a so-called ear for what’s real.”
Ms. Exception was adamant She stopped to sip her Scotch. To inhale some smoke, to exhale it, to tap ashes onto the constantly exchanged ashtray, to check Eva’s face for signs of attention and comprehension.
“This brother,” Ms. Exception continued, “comes in for the meeting that really he’s been vying for his whole life. He walks in cool and so sexy and sexual to them. And this brother’s sexy to you, too. He’s met you finally, right? A woman he thinks is smart and bred and who already knows about the things he craves. But he’ll shake you quick after you get him his goddamned deal, after you up his goddamned budget, after you take him around to all the goddamned parties—and I’m not saying that white boys won’t do the same, Eva, that they haven’t done the same. They have.”
“So what, then?” Eva said, sipping her drink and feeling righteously cosmopolitan. Eva sat back gracefully while wondering from where Ms. Exception had purchased her flawless gray silk jersey dress and gray ostrich sling-backs. Eva wondered, as she sipped her drink again, if she’d ever be so unflappable and generous and sophisticated all at the same time. She imagined the sweet day when a $1,000 bag would be tucked as casually as Ms. Exception’s—at her own hip. Eva wondered if she’d ever truly run things.
“Eva,” Ms. Exception said, like Eva had been running her mouth. “Little Sister. Listen more. Talk less. And get yourself some decent jewelry. Start with earrings. Good diamonds. Pay the fifteen grand—you’ll have them for life, and men’ll know what you expect.”
Little Sister is what Ms. Exception often called Eva. Eva felt the love in the words, had yet to put her finger on the grandiosity. “I’m saying I expect—I used to expect—more from a brother. I never expected shit from a white man, was raised never to expect shit from him. So when a white man acts right, looks out for me, it stands out extra tall. Because in my mind, white boys start from under zero, anyway. When a brother dogs me—in this business, in life, and the two are the same thing, Eva, make no mistake—it stands out cold and short. So, for real, Little Sister, it’s about you.” Ms. Exception smiled then, and put out her cigarette. She put her bag on the table, placed her cigarettes and her sterling lighter in it, pulled out her coat check and tapped the tablecloth with it. “It’s about being wise. You don’t need to let people know who your allies are or who they aren’t. I see it in you, Eva. You’re motivated. You don’t talk from the side of your mouth. You’re a winner.”
So thrilled was she to be sitting across from her future, Eva didn’t pluck the shinola from the shit. She’d been around, but not enough to know Ms. Exception had, when the Commodores were still a band, been married to Eva’s friend Hakeem. Didn’t know that the spoiled child of which Ms. Exception spoke was by a white executive with whom Ms. Exception had carried on an affair for nineteen years before he finally left his Kingston-born/Bryn Mawr-educated wife and married Ms. Exception at a small ceremony on a cloud-dotted Nevis afternoon. Eva, who picked up the bill for the cocktails and conversation, reeled in what she considered to be Ms. Exception’s hard-core truth. Eva did wonder, but only fleetingly where other black women fit into Ms. Exception’s philosophies—white men and women and black men having been broken down at length. It was years before Eva realized that black women belonged across a slender table from Ms. Exception. But more truly at her feet.
“Chill” gained popularity as a term meaning “to relax, calm down,” in the 1980S. It comes from Black English slang, which has been a source of informal words in Standard English, often through the medium of various African-American musical styles, including hip hop. The word “chill” has had many lives both inside and outside Black English. Since the late 1920S “chill” has been used to mean “to crush” and even “to murder” The recent use of “to chill” in the sense of “to calm down” is another example of slang’s ingeniousness: English has used variations of “cool” to refer to tranquillity since before America’s colonial era. Though “chill” is a new way of saying “cool down,” the evolution of “chill” continues: the new sense of “to relax” has recently been extended to mean “to laze among friends, to mingle.” Chill is a model of how language evolves in ways unforeseeable yet instantaneously graspable.
—THE NEW AMERICAN DICTIONARY
OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
It was with freshly tousled, oil-sheened curls and with dangling high-heeled sandals (a British designer’s, Eva’s stab at distinction) that Eva chilled at Kato’s bar. Her dress had a cinched waist and a filmy skirt, a snug bodice, and a deep, square neckline—the very definition of panache. Eva didn’t want a table at Kato’s. She knew Ron would soon be there to hold court as a new executive vice president of urban music at a label he was charged with resuscitating. Eva’d seen Ron’s promotion announced in Billboard, but she’d made her plans based on what she’d heard from her friend Hakeem, who knew everybody and everything.
Hakeem’s data was on point.
“Eva,” Ron said. “I thought you might be out here.” He was surprised, she could tell, but as unruffled as she’d ever seen him. Especially as he wasn’t wearing his usual promotional T-shirt and jeans and sneakers. Ron, in black pants and a light sweater, was a part of a long tradition—a white guy in charge of black music—so Eva hadn’t given him a Mr. Nickname. People Eva knew had begun to call him Ron more than Lil’ John.
“Duty calls,” she said. Eva’s plan had been to be beautiful, and to assault him with straightforwardness. She wanted to say, I came here tonight because I knew you’d be here. I have something to tell you, but here’s not the place.
“Wish you woulda called me,” he said. “Today, I mean. I got a table, but I got this girl coming by. She’s not my girl, she’s this rapper, outta Tampa, and she’s expecting my—”
“Attention.”
“You know the game.”
“My friend Hawk’s gonna be here,” Eva said brightly, “so—”
“Hawk? Somebody’s friend? That’s new.”
“You like Hakeem.” Eva knew this to be true.
“I keep him close.” Ron glanced up at the bar. No bartender. “Why are we acting, though,” Ron said, moving closer to Eva, “like we don’t know each other’s secrets?” He was sweet about it. Ron’s face fell into the startle-eyed, slight smile he could have when something other than new money and fresh triumph pleased him.
“’Cause we don’t.”
His face lifted back to false mellowness. The bartender had returned, and stood framed by neat rows of bottles. Bars had begun to seem glamorous and twinkly to Eva, havens lined with labels promising escape to Monte Cristo, Bombay, Belvedere, and Calvados. The bottles stamped JAMESON’S WHISKEY SIX YEARS OLD or GLENMORANGIE SINGLE HIGHLAND MALT stood out zaftig among bones. Eva identified with Ron’s hard gaze at them.
“So you sitting with Hawk?” Ron said. He got the barkeep’s attention with a glance. “Or with me?” Whether he was the issuer or the receiver, whether it was business or it was personal, Ron wasn’t one to hesitate before an ultimatum.
Eva stood. She relaxed one shoulder, challenged him a little with her chin.
Ron was charmed by what he perceived as her confidence, by what he considered only a slight style transformation. He was worried, as he tended to be around Eva, about his utter appreciation of her beauty. It made him raw.
“Sit with me,” he said, and when she continued staring at him, he added, with a twinge of awkwardness, “please.”
When a man appreciated Eva’s looks, and the effort she put into enhancing them, Eva heard her father’s voice, and knew he’d been right about everything. The bartender brought Ron a Scotch, and after a quick scissorslike gesture of Ron’s fingers, poured one for Eva.