by Danyel Smith
This wasn’t the way she was thinking in Malibu, though, or on Wilshire Boulevard.
Eva didn’t call Ron during the week before the procedure. She didn’t call him on the day of, when she took a cab to the hospital, got herself admitted as an outpatient, stripped, and put on a backless gown and paper slippers and paper bonnet. Eva didn’t think of her artists or her coworkers or her competitors as the registered nurse wheeled her in—catheter inserted and taped to her hand again. She didn’t think of how she was going to con the doctor into letting her get alone into a cab when they’d asked for the name of a person who would pick her up and see her home. On the form, Eva’d written C.R. SUMMERS, a girl who’d sat next to Eva at one of her high schools, a girl Eva’d shared a cafeteria table with once or twice and who had gone off to college somewhere in the South, and whom Eva had never seen again. On the gurney, Eva’s teeth chattered and her lips were dry and the only thing she really thought was How will I look at myself two days from now when the bleeding has tapered off and the pain pills are no longer necessary? How will I look at myself even when I pass a glass pane on the street? How will I look at myself—I’m about to count backward from ten; I know the drill, that’s how low-down I am—when I wake up, and what was there is gone? What was alive, now dead.
Think about it!
That’s what Eva said to herself as hall doors snapped open automatically to receive her.
Think about it! It’s the least you can do, considering the physical pain is minimal. Think! The embryo—no, the baby—will be vacuumed out. Killed. Disposed of And you will ride away with imaginary Carleen Summers. You’ll be free of what would have been your responsibility.
That’s when she thought hard about Ron.
And Ron’s is what she thought. His responsibility, too.
But she wouldn’t have called him then, even if she could have. Her last thought before the anesthetic solution relaxed her muscles and took her into a quick coma was that this was her problem. She was the one who was pregnant. Every boy, Eva thought, is not my boyfriend.
They pulled up on the black brick drive of the Peninsula Beverly Hills. Eva got out quickly. She was almost through the glass front doors when she heard another car door shut, heard one of the white-suited valets say, “How long, sir?”
Ron answered, “Not sure.” As he came around the car and walked toward her, he said, “We’re not finished.”
“We are.”
“Not because you say so. You do owe me,” he said, pushing the door for her, “the courtesy of a conversation.”
They got on the elevator, and then got to her Grand Deluxe room. A Grand Deluxe room was better than a Deluxe room, though not as big or as fly as the Patio Grand Deluxe or the eleven-hundred-square-foot Executive Grand Deluxe, and not near as big as the Grand Deluxe Suite or the private, stand-alone garden Villas to which Eva aspired. Her Grand Deluxe Room did have Italian linens and French doors and her choice of domestic newspaper delivered daily and a minibar and three telephones. It was what she and Ron knew together—hotel rooms. This one was nicer then the ones they’d been in Italy. But it was the same impersonal vibe. Nothing of hers, nothing of his. Clean sheets twice a day.
He sat, and she did.
“So the way it is,” Ron said, “is you come to the restaurant to tell me you had an abortion of our baby, and now you’re mad at me.”
Our. This gave her courage. “Why didn’t you call me,” Eva said, “after the tour?”
“You had an abortion because I didn’t call you?”
Eva resisting blowing up, resisted saying she could never explain to him why she had the abortion, why she’d had any of them, but thought instead, No, you asshole, it’s not because you didn’t call. “I’m asking you,” she said, “like a point of information.”
“Rules of order. Okay. I didn’t call you because when we were in Italy, you acted like it was all fun for you—fun only. And when we were at the airport—”
“And you were talking about the sex house.”
“You love sex. Or you act like you do. The way we were over there, I thought I was saying some shit you wanted to hear.”
Ron said, “I wasn’t trying to play myself.”
“If I was a white girl,” Eva said, “you would’ve called.” She didn’t even know if she believed that. It was a test.
“Since it seems to matter, I haven’t been with a white girl in … eight years.” Saying it, not the fact of it, distressed him. He looked her in her eye, though, as he declared what Eva thought had to be a hatred of himself.
“Why? That’s your thing?” She thought he was pitiful.
“It is what it is.” Suddenly proud, and ashamed a little that he was proud, he looked down and wiped at the white quilt like there was lint on it. “It’s who pulls me. I don’t fight what naturally pulls me.” Then he looked at her again. “It’s who gets pulled to me, too.”
“You have superiority in your head. Built in. So you go in on top, in your head.”
“Yeah. I’m always three steps ahead of every black girl.”
“And black male. Don’t say it like it’s impossible. Like it’s some kind of urban legend.”
“I know what you’re trying to say, what you’re saying. I know how the world is. But one, you’re changing the subject—”
“This is the subject.”
“You had the abortion,” he said, “because I’m white?”
Eva looked at him. I was not ready. I am not ready. I had it because I could.
“And if anyone feels superior in this situation, our situation, not the world’s situation or the country’s situation, it’s you.”
Our. Eva wanted to say, This is the third abortion I’ve had, the fourth baby I’ve gotten rid of, and this is the first time the father has been a white man. But what she said was, “How I feel is nothing in the face of how things are.”
“You don’t believe that. If you did, you wouldn’t have found me at Kato’s. I never would have known about you being pregnant.”
She hated the word pregnant. Like positive, it had equally horrible and wonderful meanings. And the first syllable sounded big and round to Eva. Full and absolute. “Do we have to keep talking about it?”
“You showed up to talk about it.” He paused. “Or did you want to see me? Too. Do you feel—”
“Bad?” She nodded, felt like a freak. A dumb slut. Selfish and not worthy of anything she owned or any break in the wall of disgust by which she was surrounded.
“Can’t share nothing else,” Ron said, “so you decided to share the guilt.”
The fact of what he said made her angry.
“Make me an accessory after the fact,” he said flatly and quietly, as if agreeing with himself. “You want me—” He moved nearer to her on the bed and put his arm around her shoulder like they were chums. They sat there awkwardly. Eva finally leaned into him.
“I’m probably not one,” Ron said, “for carrying in soup on a tray. But maybe I could have flown out there. Something. Did it take … long? I mean, did it hurt?”
Eva pressed into him closer. She wanted to hear his voice so sweet, but not the words coming from his mouth. Ron leaned her back on the bed, and she rolled onto her side. He got up, pulled a pillow from under the coverlet, pressed it against her stomach and chest. “Hold onto it,” he said to her.
Ron lay behind her, his chin on her head, an arm around her waist and the pillow, his chest against her back. “Hold onto it,” he said again.
Eva pressed her back into him, clutched the cushion, and felt a frantic, unearned gladness. It was good to hold onto something. Good to be held.
Ron’s arm tightened around her. The mute pump of his heart sucked hers closer. His blood was awhirl, anxious to take back its living place in her body. For lists of reasons that matched in some places, both were ashamed of who they were. The ashamedness was imbedded and unacknowledged, wholly American and completely un-American: each believed they had to be who they were with
no choice in the matter. And they were on their way up.
Listen to my heart beat, went the song in Eva’s head. For you.
Eva and Ron didn’t have sex. To each of them, and with a draining intensity that pulled them into a deep sleep, it felt like love.
In the morning, Eva woke first.
“Ron,” she said, and shook him gently. “Lil’ John. I got sound-check in ninety minutes. Way out in Universal City.”
Ron’s eyes opened. In his sleepy state, he looked at her with contentment. Her words seemed to hit him after a delay. He wiped his eyes. “Soundcheck,” he said. “Right.” He twisted, stood, and adjusted his clothes.
Eva felt better. She felt she’d done the right thing by telling Ron everything, when she hadn’t told him much at all.
“That’s how you’re playing me,” Ron said.
“Huh?”
“Not so much as a good morning. Cool. So, tonight? Dinner at the new spot on Sunset. It’s where everybody’s at on Fridays. Oh no, we both got the awards thing tonight, so maybe drinks after? And then we can come back up here. Order more Scotch from room service, then make it hot. Right? PeaceLove&Money tour, all over again.”
“Why’re looking at me like that? So evil?”
“I’m on your program.” And after a quick glance in a mirror, he was out the door.
Eva saw Ron at the awards show that night, but he was far across the room talking to artists, talking to women, talking to the spruced up Tampa MC. When Eva was backstage, Ron was out front. When Eva was out front, she saw Ron busily, casually heading backstage. Eva’s pager didn’t chirp with Ron’s number, and Eva didn’t beep Ron. Eva did go to a bar after the show, alone. Drank Glenmorangie because the name sounded dramatic and because she saw high rollers ordering it. She stretched one Scotch out for thirty minutes. Stretched another. And another.
Eva didn’t hear from Ron until she’d been back in New York for over a month. He suggested she meet him in Midtown, at yet another hotel room.
“It’s what we do,” he said, when she’d suggested her apartment. So Eva left her office, met him at his room, and without much more than a “Hey” and a “Hey,” Eva and Ron did their thing. They had sex, awash in whiskey, and it was as good as it had ever been. Eva, though, had faint bruises inside her thighs from where he pressed his fingers. Ron had bite marks on his chest, and Eva had scratched red welts over his neck and back. Laden as forensic traces, wisps of Eva’s hair lay on the white sheets. Strands of it wound through the rings on Ron’s right hand.
He made a point of telling Eva he was in town for four more days. “Call me,” he said as tritely as he was able, “if you need anything.”
She didn’t call.
A few months later they were both in Reno for the International DJ Festival and neither called the other. They ran into each other at a showcase, made allusions to “complicated situations” and “crazy, needy” artists. Ron and Eva clinked glasses and kept moving.
When Eva was back in Los Angeles, for the Trix video shoot, and for a meeting about a possible new promotion, she had also a meeting in Ron’s building, so she made her way by his office. They left together, and there was dinner before the sex back at the Peninsula in Eva’s Grand Deluxe Suite. Twelve hundred square feet, marble bathroom with oversize tub, complimentary fruit basket, VCR, and bedside electronic panel to control the fan, lighting, and valet call buttons. Even at the Peninsula, in the Grand Deluxe Suite, they didn’t discuss the last time they’d been there together in her lesser Grand Deluxe room. And they never—not in 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, or 1997—discussed the abortion.
Instead, they kissed and licked like there was no sugar sweeter. Eva began to scratch through to blood. He pushed into her from behind until she jerked away, cursing and teasing. Eva and Ron didn’t drive-by fuck. Good at each other’s bodies, they settled in for opera. Eva and Ron were the most themselves with each other in bed, excavating psyches until their souls scraped.
Always they inched to their corners after, exhausted, haltingly angry and satisfied. They dozed twitchily, each wanting to be the first awake and gone. They’d move toward the bed’s center, comforted by the other’s regular rasps and moist smells. Ron and Eva pressed and pawed each other unconsciously and affectionately. They nursed muddled blues.
CHAPTER 17
Cat Island
Goats sniffed at conch shells and waded through Audrey’s starfish crop. The sand seemed more pink than usual to Eva. It was as if red coals were buried beneath. From her frying hollow on the beach, Eva smelled fish in burning butter. It made her nauseous. Audrey walked onto the sand, offering a short glass of amber liquid.
Scotch? Eva hoped. I wish.
Because Eva’d caught a cold, and Pritz could hear it through the phone, and because Eva’d been progressively more evil with Pritz in each call since their first one, Eva had been able to put her off for three days. But the former Giada Biasella was to arrive on Cat Island the next afternoon, and the thought of Pritz squealing “Ciao!” in person made Eva twist a knot into the huge tank she was wearing. It was Dart’s, and it came to her knees. The armholes hung to her waist, and she had a square of green batik thrown over her shins.
The Rowe House was not like the one Eva, Pritz, and two of Pritz’s girlfriends had shared on Montego Bay the winter before. That palace had two stories, four bedrooms, silken sofas, a snooty cook, a thorough housecleaner, and an almond-tree-shaded pool with a view of the bay. There’d been ginger iced tea, and ackee and saltfish served on china. Star-apple salad and rum cocktails for lunch, and then whatever substances Pritz had hustled in or acquired locally to increase the relaxation level or sexual timbre or to decrease the number of sleep hours needed.
On Cat, though, Eva wasn’t in a jet skiing mood or a shucked-oysters-and-all-night-at-the-casino mood or a girl-talk-with-pseudo-girlfriends mood or a flirt-with-and-maybe-fuck-the-French-business-man-on-holiday mood. On Cat, Eva wanted liquor but wasn’t drinking it. She was sleeping long heavy hours and waking rested, even if stiff and congested and queasy. On Cat, Eva had yet to put on a bathing suit and walk in the ocean. Even with Dart the way he was, and maybe because of it, Eva felt ensconced in the safety and seclusion of the Rowe House and its tiny patio. She was in Gladys Knight’s simpler place and time. The rush of the sea and the fact of her pregnancy was plenty.
She wanted to get back in bed with Dart and suck on some orangey benne cake. Eva wanted to smell Dart’s salty apricot smell, dream about her child. Eva pictured herself and Dart and a faceless baby. Dart on real drugs and not sleeping so much and Benjamin and Audrey and Édouard and even Jenny and the Skip—her family. Eva and Dart and the son would walk on the beach and Dart would swing the child by its arms and there would be embraces and the Rowe House would be brightly lit and well-appointed and the Rowes would never return. Eva believed it was a sweet slice of hell specific to her generation to be wise to the absurdity of Hallmarkian dreams, indeed to feel superior to them—but to still dream them in Technicolor, and with a booming soundtrack. Eva wanted some Scotch with her benne cake.
“Take this,” Audrey said, thrusting a small glass at Eva. She stomped her foot at the goats.
Eva shook her head. “No medicine.” Eva wiped at puffed eyes, and then hacked phlegm into a napkin. She felt like she was imposing herself onto the stinging, flawless day.
“It’s honey,” Audrey said curtly. “Lemon.”
The thought of a coat on her scratchy throat appealed, but Eva had a creepy flash about bees and their digestive enzymes and pregnancy. She believed Audrey’s good intention but said, “No, thanks. Maybe just some lemon water?”
Audrey brought her eyebrows together. “If I wanted to bring you water, that’s what I would have bring. It’s an old tale about honey. Honey is fine for you even now.”
Eva wondered from where she’d heard bad news about honey and pregnancy, and what the full story was. She wondered if girls all their lives attracted random bits of baby info to thei
r brains like pins to a magnet. Eva wondered if she had instinct. Her current one was to lie in the sun and bake the cold from her body. Eva hadn’t taken a thing for her cold except lemon juice in hot water, and her leg bled puss because she hadn’t put on it so much as a dab of antique Neosporin from the Rowe’s bathroom cabinet.
“I guess I can’t complain of you sitting there,” Audrey said, “a bump on a log.” Then she cocked her head toward the Rowe House. “But he needs to get up.”
“He gets up,” Eva said with a cough.
“When I don’t see him. He doesn’t even swim—” Audrey knocked back the honey and lemon herself.
“I told you he has a problem.” Eva scratched her nose and chin. “I can’t explain it to you.” Eva’s skin was burned and peeling on her face, shoulders, chin, and cleavage. Her nose was raw from blowing, and she had the raised bumps of prickly heat inside her elbows. Her hair was brittle. Her finger- and toenails were hard and chipped. Dart was sullen and always sleeping, so she’d been spending every day, almost dawn to dusk, in the rays.
Audrey sat down next to Eva on the sand like it wasn’t sizzling. “If you don’t bring him food to the bed,” she said, “I bet he won’t starve to death.”
Dart wasn’t eating much of what Eva brought him as it was. “Dart’s unhappy in this world,” she said almost proudly. “Ill at ease.”