by Danyel Smith
She sat across from Ron at a table for eight. The Tampa rapper showed up in jeans and a too-big bomber jacket. Her predeal clothes made her uncomfortable and made Eva feel superior, especially when the girl, who was cute if a little rough around the edges, mumbled hellos to the industry luminaries and hangers-on at Ron’s table. The girl looked at Ron searchingly and then turned abruptly toward the door with her pink-haired manager. Ron jumped up and walked them from Kato’s, and the dialogue Eva imagined was one she’d have in the same situation—all assurances and affection and promises that when the rapper blew up, she’d walk into Kato’s and everyone would kiss her feet. That someone else told the tales she did was as much a comfort to Eva as her hazel iris of Scotch.
Ron got back to the table, didn’t sit, and said, “I’m out.” Then he added, “No worries,” and it was understood that the bill was taken care of. To Eva, Ron reached out his hand and said, “Let’s roll.”
She was happy and confirmed by this—as she always was by public displays, however vague and abbreviated. Eva kept her attitude, scooted with assurance from the table. She and Ron got in his spotless car. He wanted to show her the house in Malibu he’d just purchased.
They inched onto crowded Sunset Boulevard, and Eva saw the Mondrian, the hotel at which she used to stay when in Los Angeles. Limousines to hide the stars, went the disco tune in Eva’s head, tinted windows to hide the scars. Then to And in the city it’s a pity ‘cause we just can’t hide—tinted windows don’t mean nuthin’, they know who’s inside. She was usually mesmerized by the Strip’s brutal billboards, had partied on its lamp-thawed plazas, grubbed at 3:00 a.m. at the pristine restaurants, overseen artists’ visits to the florid record stores. Donna Summer, Eva tagged her thoughts. And Run-D.M.C.
Ron and Eva rode along quietly. The Tampa rapper’s voice rhymed away through the speakers. Ron’ll never clear the Steely Dan sample is what Eva thought. So it doesn’t even matter that the shit sounds good. And if Ron does get it cleared, it’ll be a zillion dollars.
Ron sped through the part of Sunset lined with memorial parks and tall hedges hiding golf-worthy lawns and mansions with columns Eva connected with plantation houses of the South. Then through Brentwood and Bel-Air, the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains, and a garden shrine housing the ashes of Mahatma Ghandi. Eva knew Malibu, and it seemed closer to Hollywood than usual. She was nervous as they rode north on the Pacific Coast Highway a short stretch, then turned away from the ocean and up a steep street lined with the garage doors of homes whose fronts mocked the tide with astonished faces. Drink Scotch whiskey all night long and die behind the wheel. That was the line, the unclearable snatch of song.
Ron pulled into a garage under what seemed a small house for the neighborhood. He switched off his car.
Eva did what she did in business meetings when she had bad news to pass on. She took a deep breath, tried to speak as if her news was rosy, prepared to tell as much of the truth as she could while pretending to tell the full and exact truth.
Eva said, “I don’t know if you want to know this.” Spineless, she chided herself. Get to it.
“Not a good way to start a conversation between two people who’ve had sex like us.”
“Not that.”
“I didn’t think so. But still.” He paused. “You’re not pregnant.” Ron’s chest was still up near the steering wheel, fingers on the key in the ignition.
“No.”
“What, then? Damn. Work? Fired?”
“I was pregnant.”
“By me.”
“Yeah.” Eva’s hands had sweated a circle on her skirt.
Ron sat back in his seat. The keys dangled with a tinkle.
“You had an—”
“Mm-hm.” Eva nodded. Dewar’s, she thought. Bushmills, Jamesons. The warmth of the one drink at Kato’s had faded. She wanted its hollow heat.
“You didn’t feel,” he said, “like I should be in on it.”
“In on it to say what.”
“You coulda had it?” It was the first time Eva’d heard Ron sound actually unsure. He could make himself sound unsure. He could make himself sound almost any way that served his strategy or justified his end. But she’d never heard an unintentional waver in his voice. It made him sound fragile, and so to Eva, sincere.
“I’m nobody’s baby’s mama.” They got a name for the winners of the world. I want a name when I lose. Eva could shake the Tampa rapper’s voice. But Steely Dan was forever.
Ron switched on the car, buzzed open the moon roof. Rafters and a concrete ceiling above them.
“I know you’re not judging me.” Eva’s own heat kicked in where the liquor would have.
“You judged me,” he said. “When you didn’t call to say what was going on. You judged me in Europe. At the airport. Shit, before the airport.” He was looking straight ahead.
“You were talking about a sex house,” Eva said. “Are we sitting under it now?”
“You’re the one—”
She sat up, ready. “One what?” She stopped before she called him a motherfucker, since this time it was literal.
“The one that was carrying my baby and aborted it.” The word aborted’was a fart from his mouth. He wouldn’t look at her. “That’s the one you are.”
Eva reached onto the floor, picked up her shiny pocketbook. Held tight to what was hers—lipstick, phone, passport—and to what the $800 bag meant, to the security it stood for. “I don’t owe you jack, really,” she said.
“Owe? How could you owe? You gotta take something to owe. At least accept something. What could you owe me?”
Speak the truth, white boy, she thought. You know it like I know it. I couldn’t owe you a goddamned thing. Under any circumstance. She patted door leather for the handle and opened the car. Eva stepped onto the spotless floor, walked through the open garage door and into the moonlight. She teetered a bit. The heels of her sandals felt like ballpoint pens.
She thought of Ron with loathing. She didn’t see him as one of those cartoonish white-boy gangstas from Idaho. She didn’t think of him as a caricature of a caricature. She didn’t go that far. She allowed, as she usually did, that Ron at least tried to have something of his own.
But what is it to be white? To have that, as your base? And on top of it to be all up in me. All up in my business.
These are the things she thought, because she was angry at herself, and guilty. She had been in the studio, with A Tribe Called Quest. Q-Tip, the lead MC, recording his part of a new song called “Award Tour.” She’d been there, just hanging, because she loved the trio and because she’d dated the DJ, Ali, for a while. There was a line … You can be white and cool but don’t prep the role. Or it was You can be white and blue but don’t crap the roll. Eva wanted to know the exact words of the song right then. She scraped her mind for Q-Tip’s exact words, his phrasing, his cadence, everything.
This night, the night she told Ron about her abortion, the night she was feeling as low-down as she’d felt strapped to the gurney, she thought of Ron like she thought on any given day of most white males in hip hop: that down to his drawers and up to his buzzed haircut, Ron was a biter. All of him one big bite of black people—not of what we created, even, but of what we actually are. What we in hip hop have become. Ron and his wack-ass compadres take big bites of our evolution. Not even chewed and regurgitated! They slap us still bloody and dripping on their sorry selves. This is where her mind went. She counted his faults. She was aware of what she was doing, and thought, That’s what they do. They get mad at themselves and they count the stereotypes. So, cool. But really I don’t even need that justification. I don’t need justification for anything I do or don’t do in terms of this or any white boy. He’s thinking black girl right now. He’s thinking nigga that killed the baby with no remorse.
Ron and Eva were both quiet.
White boy, Eva thought.
Got your fucking nerve.
You didn’t build no city on rock ‘n�
�� roll.
You ain’t built shit.
Then Ron laid on his horn. It ripped through the silent enclave. “You climbing down this mountain in those heels, Eva? Where you going?” He leaned on the horn again, for five long seconds. Rested. He honked again. And rested. Eva didn’t move. He opened his door, put one foot out, and called to her. “Get in the car,” he said, half-command, half-plea. “I’ll take you where you need to go.”
Trying to tell me about myself. Trying to tell me anything.
She got in his car. Every curve in his face puffed and pissed off. She thought he was going to peel out like a maniac, but he backed out like he was on his way to work, and early enough to beat the traffic.
“I’m not saying we were in love, Eva.” Matter-of-factly. “I’m trying to talk to you.”
“Talk, then.” Who’s to say that I’m in love with you? But who’s to say that I’m not? Eva’s mind sang and tagged. Janet Jackson, “Miss You Much,” 1989. Tagged and sang.
“If you could just chill for—”
Chill? “Fuck you.” She looked at him and she wanted to spit on him. He’d said chill a thousand times to her, around her. Right then she hated the way he sounded saying chill. Chuck Chill-Out, went Eva’s brain, New York City radio DJ, veteran, been on air since 1982. Groove B-Chill from House Party. Chill Will of the Get Fresh Crew.
“Chill” belongs to me. I could never, Eva thought, owe you shit.
Ron glanced at her. “How are you looking at me? I’m your white boy now? That’s it? Me being a brother right now, though, I could say what I wanted.”
“Don’t mention brothers to me.” What right do you have to mention a black man, even a hypothetical one, to me?
He turned up the radio. A talk radio host introduced callers.
—We’re back and still discussing the continuing effects of the Los Angeles uprising. Tomorrow night we have a special guest, Sister Souljah on Bill Clinton and on Ice-T’s “Cop Killer.” On the line right now we have Linda, from West L.A.
—It was stupid we tore up our own neighborhoods, yes! But were people thinking? NO! People are enraged! Can you understand the words, long simmering resentment? Can you understand that video? Can you understand the last three hundred years? Where do you think that goes? Nowhere but up in flames on the right day.
—Linda, appreciate your passionate response. Gonna go straight to Brad, now, from Rancho Cucamonga.
—I’m LAPD. I’m a white cop. Blacks hate us. They can say that. We can’t say how we feel about them, even the criminals. If we do, we’re racist assholes.
—Brad, good to hear from you, but we’ve got to go to Paul from Venice.
—I’m homeboy to my heart—straight-up second-generation Mexicano, and you know what? I can’t be racist. Blacks can’t be racist. I don’t know what to say about the Koreans, but it’s not about the color. It’s about the power. Why can’t white people understand that. My wife’s a white girl, and I ask her that all the time. It’s a willful ignorance, that’s what I tell her. Sometimes she agrees with me.
From the steering wheel, Ron switched the station. He found a Sade song. This was a consolation to Eva. Ron knew it.
When she was in college, Eva thought Sade held the map for heartbreak. Eva buzzed down the window.
I still feel the chill as I reveal my shame to you/I wear it like a tattoo.
She let Sade wash over her, let the sea air hit her face.
“Where’re you staying?” Ron asked.
“The Peninsula.”
“Aaah,” Ron said. “With the big dogs.”
Eva nodded her head like, Albo-fucking-lutely.
She didn’t look Ron’s way.
Eva kicked off her sandals. Held her purse in her lap as they cruised Wilshire, the perpetual L.A. boulevard a socialist millionaire forced the city to name for him, the sometime stomping grounds of crews like Uncle Jamm’s Army. Kids used to pop-lock at Maverick’s Flat on Crenshaw Eva had roller-skated at World on Wheels on the Westside and at Flipper’s in Hollywood. Flipper’s was a Rite-Aid now.
This world moves fast, Eva thought. I’m gonna be twenty-seven this year. Too young to be mulling over how things used to be.
Eva thought about her rented car, still at Kato’s. She thought about what time she had to be at soundcheck in the morning (early), about how to tell Lois from Trix that if she went with the video director of their dreams, Trix would need to go triple platinum before they ever made a dime. Eva thought about the strapless bra she needed for the next night’s gig. She thought about which of her acts, recording at various places around the country, needed a call, a prompt, an apology, a something. Eva thought of the man she was dating in New York City, a Spanish guy older than Ron in this business. Eva tried not to think of the indictment on Ron’s face, but it was difficult when he was right by her, suddenly and obviously taking the long way to her hotel.
For all the ire she’d expressed and hidden in Malibu, Eva had wanted, in a passing fantasy, to tell Ron she might be pregnant back when she first suspected. Eva’d wanted to call him when her period was three weeks late, but Eva thought of being pregnant as a justification for calling him that she wouldn’t yield to. He’d see through the pregnancy, to her having wanted to call—the call being an expression of her missing and wanting him.
Until the moment Eva decided against having the baby—on her own, and with no advice from anyone—she weighed the idea of having it and never telling Ron. Weighed the idea of telling Ron it was his—after the baby was born. Never did she consider adoption.
Once I carry it, it’ll be mine to raise.
Not giving the baby up for adoption was the only absolute Eva had when it came to pregnancy. Though logically she knew that giving it up after it got here was less ultimate than getting rid of it, the fact of her arbitrary rule made her think of herself as a person with an off-kilter morality gauge, which led her to imagine what kind of off-kilter mother she would be, which led her to think of how a baby would fit—or not fit—into her life, which led Eva to think of herself as selfish and shallow for even having had the previous thought, which led her to reflect on the kind of narcissistic, cold mother she would be, which led her to visit a female doctor on New York’s Upper West Side who “performed the procedure” at a small hospital nearby. The visit confirmed for Eva (it was, technically, her third abortion and fourth child) just how about work and about self she could be. Eva had the money, after all, to raise a child in the good nanny-private school-organic veggie-music camp way that would give the kid a head start over almost everyone.
The doctor, though, was kind. The doctor didn’t refer Eva to aides or techs for the ultrasounds and the blood work. “Some women prefer general anesthesia because they’ve had it before and liked it,” said the doctor, like general anesthesia was a fruit-acid facial, a real glow-getter. “Some want it because they’ve experienced sexual assault or trauma, and so being unconscious will make the abortion easier. Some women simply have a low threshold for pain. Local anesthesia is fine for early term abortion, but some women have fears about pain, period, so general is an appreciated option.”
Eva nodded, so the doctor continued.
“Some women want to be unconscious so they have no memory of the procedure.”
It promotes amnesia. But they can’t give you anesthesia, general or otherwise, for this part of it. This is the part you need it for. This, and the last ten weeks. The “so much” that was “ahead of me” is here. I have no excuse. I just don’t want to have a kid.
How am I doing this? Eva asked herself. How is this even legal?
Eva chose general. She felt she qualified for it due to the doctor’s first statement, and her last one. The woman asked no questions about Eva’s marital status, or about the father. The doctor’s waiting room was nonexistent, just a receptionist’s desk, and then you were led to one of three examination rooms where you could ponder your and your baby’s fate in private, surrounded by Metropolitan Home and The Ne
w Yorker, by framed Cape Cod shore scenes and Caribbean travel posters.
Eva thought to call Ron after the initial visit, in the week before the procedure. But she didn’t because she didn’t want Ron to think she needed anything—not input, or money, or emotional support. Even if she had this baby, she wouldn’t ask him for a goddamn thing. Some of it was pride—Eva had that, though she also had discipline and fear.
Her desire was to have a kid some future day she couldn’t picture. She mostly wanted, as she had since as long as she could remember, to be free. To be independent. To not need anything but what she could provide for herself. Free to her meant having money to do what she wanted. Free to Eva meant not being married. It meant making sacrifices (for herself) and making tough decisions. It meant being able to pick up and go when she felt like it. Freedom meant being able to do this and still put forth a face that spoke of lightheartedness and a lack of complication. This was the freedom to which Eva had aspired and acquired. She was sharp enough to get what freedom had meant to people born before hip hop. Freedom meant no more back-of-the-bus. Royalties supposedly paid fairly to artists. No more church bombings. No more trees with strange fruit. No more back-alley, wire-hanger abortions. Better jobs. Equal pay for equal work. Oh yeah, Eva thought. Let freedom ring. I can get a goddamn abortion for seven hundred and fifty dollars and I can get bitch-ho lyrics played on the pop stations.
In Eva’s favorite fantasy she would pick up her phone one sunny day and have it be Ron. She could sound breezy and busy but down to hang out. She would not be pregnant. She would seduce his body easily, and his heart eventually, and if the black-white thing didn’t rear its head, they could be one of those interracial couples that seemed untouched by the effect their presence had on others, the kind that had surmounted the insurmountable issue of race, the kind that acknowledged the gulf between them as just another kind of gulf, and gulfs existed between couples all the time—cultural, sexual, emotional, regional—and people dealt with them, stayed together through them. Eva and Ron could be the kind of couple that had a nice house in a nice neighborhood, the kind that understood each other’s jobs and dreams. Eva had never been in a relationship that lasted longer than eight months in row. She’d never argued about domestic issues. She’d never fought over anything except punctuality, hip hop, her job, and her right to be her. Eva felt that if she and Ron floated on the gulf between them, coped with it, got to know it, all other squabbles and temporary crises would seem like just those. Trivial and not worth the time it took to argue over them.