Blessed Life

by Kim Fields

  Of course, my mom, being the way she is, took the celebration a touch too far. My bathroom at her house had an enormous mirror over the double sinks, and she wrote in red, Dressed-to-Kill-style lipstick across the entire thing: “Welcome back to television.” It scared the crap out of me when I walked in and turned on the light. Who does that? I could not even read it at first; I thought I had a stalker.

  Days later, I flew to Atlanta to hang out with Bow’s mom and research the role. The sitcom pilot focused more on her than her famous son as she transitioned from being a mom and manager to just a manager. With more time on her hands, she opened an upscale boutique and began to date. Upon meeting, the two of us bonded immediately over being single and the dating scene. “I’m frustrated and honestly, I’m over it,” I told her. “Amen,” she said.

  “I’m done with the litany of excuses and justifications,” I continued, “the reasoning and quote-unquote logic of why things just aren’t right.”

  “Amen,” she said again.

  Who was researching whom, right?

  Anyway, a friend of mine who was in the play Five Guys Named Moe had invited me to dinner with some of his cast mates. I said sure. We were all in the same hotel across from the Alliance Theater where the show was being done. We met in my friend’s suite. It was Friday night, and as I stepped in the room and walked toward them, I saw my friend talking to one of his cast mates, or rather my eyes landed on the guy my friend was talking to, because I have no recollection of seeing my friend or anyone else at that instant, only this new, very handsome man. I felt my heart flutter and actually said to myself, “My God, who is that?”

  Looking back, it is an example of God’s bigger plan. It has to be. I had nothing in mind other than dinner at Houlihan’s and maybe, if I am completely open, nibbling some firecracker chicken if someone else ordered it, but otherwise sticking to a low-fat, healthy diet. Instead I got a teeming, three-course serving of the witty, charismatic, sexy man who would become my husband and the father of my children.

  His name was Christopher L. Morgan. He walked me down the street to the restaurant, standing on the outside like a gentleman. I noticed. He was old school. At the restaurant, he stepped forward and held the door open for me. Again, I noticed; the man was also courteous and gallant. Chivalry was not dead. At the table, he sat across from me and I swear, the man had swag even while sitting down.

  He also had army-green-brown eyes that were impossibly mesmerizing. I had never seen anything like them. We talked throughout dinner. He was witty and funny as all get-out. His references were also spot-on, brilliant, and old school. He seemed to have an old soul, which resonated with me, as did so much about him that night, including that he had recently worked with my beloved friend, Blair, in an Off-Broadway production of Ossie Davis’s play Purlie.

  Before the evening was over, they invited me to their rehearsal the following morning. Though I was leaving that Saturday afternoon, I accepted the offer, and I am forever grateful I did. I got to see Christopher L. Morgan perform. It was magic. It was breathtaking. As a performer, I’ve always been all about the craft, and I could see that was also at Chris’s core. He was in full possession of his craft, to the point where he turned it into pure artistry. He was in the moment, and he rendered me literally breathless.

  I was able to steal myself away long enough to call Blair in Los Angeles. Despite the three-hour time difference, which made it ridiculously early out there, he answered. That is when you know somebody really loves you. I said, “Hey, bro, do you remember meeting this brother when you guys worked together a month or two ago on Purlie?”

  Blair said, “Yeah. Chris Morgan. Hell of a dancer. Good brother. And he’s from Virginia so you know he’s cool.”

  “Okay, thanks,” I said.

  Suddenly Blair sounded more awake. “Why do you want to know?” he asked.

  “I just met him,” I said. “And I’m just wondering.”

  “Uh, all right,” he said. “Good guy. Tell him hello.”

  I did more than that. After getting Blair’s quasi-seal of approval, I slipped my number into Chris’s backpack, carefully putting it next to his wallet to ensure that he would see it. Then I left for the airport, expecting to hear from him in a day or two. When the phone did not ring after the third day, I began to wonder what was going on. Thankfully, God was merciful and kept me busy with work on the Bow pilot. Still, when I did not hear from Chris after a week, I called our mutual friend in Atlanta and asked if he knew whether Chris had received my note.

  “Yeah, he got it,” my friend said—and it killed him to hear the disappointed tone in my voice when I said, “Oh.” He could hear my heart sinking like an anchor dropped into the ocean without a rope attached. For my own well-being, I decided at that point to leave it alone and go about my business. And it was not like I was thinking anything long-term yet. Heck no. I wanted more of that feeling I had sitting next to him in the restaurant, more of that feeling of fun, excitement, curiosity, and what I thought was a mutual attraction. Whatever.

  On day ten, though, the phone rang. “Hey, it’s me—Chris.” He sounded all full of innocence and charm. My feeling was—and still is—hey, acknowledge that you at least received the information. I thought I was clever sliding my number into his bag and next to his wallet to make sure he would get it. But then to just have radio silence? You ain’t got nothing to say? Not even nice to meet you? Chris’s side is that he did not want to come off as too eager. He thought he was playing it cool by waiting. “Hey, it’s me—Kim,” I said icily, and then, with that out of the way, we talked for two hours.

  * * *

  Chris’s play officially opened in early May, which happened to fall on my birthday, and I returned to Atlanta to spend that special time with him. We planned it as a grown-up weekend—a weekend of fun and then deuces. I knew it wasn’t in line with my belief system, but this was the reality of my life as an adult woman in her middle thirties. After a touchy breakup and a failed marriage, I did not believe I was going to have that special someone in my life, and Chris, who had just gotten divorced after ten years of marriage, felt similarly.

  Therein was the problem. When it was time to say goodbye at the end of the weekend, neither one of us wanted to let go. This was not the sentiment you were supposed to have after a—and pardon me for saying it like this—after a hit-it-and-quit-it weekend. And it was not that we simply wanted to hit it again. No, we realized that we liked each other as people, as potential best friends for life. We sensed a match and the opportunity to build something together.

  The next time I visited Atlanta, Chris’s parents and his sister and brother-in-law had come to see him in the show. They had their newborn daughter with them. I happily volunteered to babysit so they could see how amazing Chris was in the show. It also gave his family and me a chance to meet. I welcomed their scrutiny. I could see them giving me a long, careful look as a babysitter, and then the different but equally long and careful look as Chris’s new love interest. They were great. I loved them. They were super protective of Chris, who was still healing from his breakup, but at the same time they got a sense of me as well as a sense of what Chris and I were developing. They saw happiness returning to his heart.

  In the meantime, I shuttled between LA and New York, working on a handful of projects, including a documentary for BET Jazz on some rare recordings jazz giants Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane had made at Carnegie Hall. The recordings had turned up in the Library of Congress. My film chronicled the footage from discovery to restoration to a reissue of the music by Blue Note Records. I was not a jazz head, which was the reason BET had brought me on board. “You’ll look at it through the lens of the masses,” the executive told me.

  Aside from being an extraordinary project, Discovering Monk and Trane: One Night at Carnegie Hall inadvertently helped focus my life. Till then, I was living at home, bopping off here and there for freelance directing gigs, and still traveling to Florida every month in sear
ch of property and my elusive juice store. The activity was great for my spirit. The busier my calendar, the better I felt. But as I worked on the Monk and Trane project and took meetings with the Caribbean Tourism Organization, I realized that I liked New York City. A lot.

  “You should really think about moving back there,” a close friend of mine said as I went on about the city’s unique energy. “You’re happy there. You love it. It could be really good for you. It could stir your pot, get some things moving in you again.” He was right. I loved jumping on the subway, walking through Central Park, or heading uptown to a favorite little Caribbean restaurant in Harlem. But what about Florida? Indeed, what about Florida?

  I had spent the past two years shopping for land there, except now when I shut my eyes and pictured myself behind the counter of a little juice bar and tending to a miniature ranch, it seemed absurd. What am I going to do on five acres except leave all the lights on and sleep with my back against the front door? I thought. It’s not like I have family or friends there.

  The difference was Christopher L. Morgan. After our grown-up weekend, we talked every day, often multiple times a day, and grew close quickly. In June, we got together in New York City. Chris had finished his gig in Atlanta and had only a few days in his schedule before he went to Kansas City for his next gig, a show called From My Hometown. He had to clear out his belongings from the apartment he had shared with his ex-wife. She had already moved her things.

  I was in New York on business, staying downtown with a girlfriend—actually, the sister of my island romance from a few years earlier. Chris and I went out on a date. Beyond having a good time, we confirmed our mutual feeling of wanting to be together. Older and experienced, we both knew what we wanted—and needed—in a relationship. Over dinner and lunch the next day, and then walking uptown hand in hand on an early summer afternoon, Chris and I made it clear that what we wanted and needed in our lives was each other.

  Later, after Chris had gone, I spent a few more days in New York. I thought about the way being with him made me feel. I also thought about the reality of making that work. Chris was booked most of the year, sometimes spending up to nine months on the road in plays. He based himself in New York. I loved the city, too. Unlike LA, where going anyplace meant getting into your car, dealing with traffic, and looking for a parking spot, I loved the freedom of being able to walk out my door and go to the store, a museum, a coffee shop, or wherever. I loved the change of seasons. I loved connecting to my roots. I loved sharing that with Chris.

  After we agreed to never go more than two weeks without seeing each other, I visited Chris in Kansas City. He was still in rehearsals. If I was in a hotel for more than twenty-four hours, my way of settling in was to rearrange the furniture, something I did as Chris watched with some astonishment. When I finished, he was impressed. “What else you got up your sleeve?” he asked.

  Nothing that I was ready to show him. In past relationships, I had been too eager to show that I would be a good wife and homemaker. I came on too strong. If I liked someone, I wanted them to see how I operated. It was too much and scared them right out of the relationship. I was a gale-force wind when a soft, warm breeze would have been more effective—and more seductive. With Chris, I played it cooler. I finally got the memo; it just arrived later in life.

  But I knew what I wanted from this relationship. I wanted permanency. Chris was a keeper. My family had provided their seal of approval. My mom and Chris also had Virginia roots in common and shared a passion for musical theater. He had gone to James Madison University. He was a self-starter who kept a gig. He would be in a play for three months at a time and often have two or three lined up. Like me, he knew how to get his hustle on, and seemed to enjoy it.

  One day later that summer I was back in Kansas City and hanging out in his hotel room. Chris had just come back from rehearsal and had plopped himself across the bed. I stared at him for a while in silence. My eyes roamed across his muscled body, from head to toe. Though we had known each other only four months, I felt like it had been a lifetime. Yet I knew that was wishful thinking. The time had passed in the blink of an eye. What I was feeling was the excitement of a lifetime ahead of us. I wanted to be together. Without the hassle of travel. And without the frustration of arranging long-distance phone calls. I took a deep breath. “Chris? You sleeping?” I said.

  “No,” he replied, turning his head slightly and looking at me through one eye. “What’s up?”

  “I’d like to share the same zip code with you,” I said. “How do we do that and make it work so that you’re comfortable with it, too?”

  I about passed out as those words came out of my mouth. I thought the Lord was going to slap those sentences out of my mouth before I could say them. I had never lived with a man outside of my first husband. But I had never done a lot of things I did with Chris. I had never felt the way I felt when I was with him.

  And now that I had put my cards on the table—let’s say I showed him a full house—the next move was his.

  18

  Wife

  Yeah, I’m with you,” Chris said after sitting up in bed and thinking about it for a moment. “I get it. I see it. Let’s do it.”

  From then on, the hunt was on. Once I began looking at apartments, though, I went straight to my sweet spot—Harlem. When I lived there from birth to age six, it was simply home, the place where I lived, and I never lost that sense of having lived there and calling it home. Over the years, I frequented the homes of friends who had moved there, restaurants that had opened, and shops and clubs. By 2005, Harlem was in the midst of yet another revitalization—not a renaissance per se, but a rediscovery. Space was limited in Manhattan. People with money were buying buildings and restoring the brownstones. Hip restaurants opened. Hearing about the places where I was looking at apartments, my mom marveled, “Your Harlem is not my Harlem.”

  To be sure, my Harlem was rebuilt and more racially diverse. The streets were also safer than in the 1960s and ’70s. Chris and I saw one place that was directly across the street from St. Nicholas Park, a walk-up whose listing made it sound full of potential. But when we got there, we saw it was next to an empty lot that was home to dozens of clucking chickens. Inside, the building had a pronounced tilt to it. “Is this place sinking?” Chris asked as we climbed the stairs.

  “Or is it going to just fall down one day?” I asked.

  The radiator in the bedroom had a janky sort of chain attaching it to a pole. I jangled it curiously; New York wasn’t prone to earthquakes. “What’s this?” I asked. “Handcuffs?”

  Hearing that, Chris, who had been in another room, poked his head in the doorway and quipped, “We’ll take it!”

  We settled on a little brownstone with a large front living room window that looked onto the tree-lined street but felt as if it opened up to the entire world. You know how a place can speak to you? This room spoke to me. It said, “Kim, you’re home. You’re home, baby.” Literally. We were across the street from St. Nicholas Park, a minute-and-a-half walk from the building where I grew up, and a five-minute walk to my grandmother’s old apartment. The best part was when the owner asked a favor. There was a baby grand piano in the living room. It had been there forever, he said. Could he leave it?

  Well, Chris played the piano exquisitely, any style of music, so our answer was a no-brainer—of course, the stately instrument could stay with us. Then, in asking about its history, we discovered the piano had come from the church where my mother had been baptized. We smiled at each other. It was meant to be.

  Indeed, moving in also felt more blessed than stressed. As we unpacked, Chris and I needed a rental truck to move the few things he still had in storage. I had to show my driver’s license to rent it, but I could not find my wallet amid all the clutter. However, while searching, I found the box with my professional memorabilia. I pulled out one of my Jet magazine covers. “This can be my ID,” I said. Chris made no comment, but I could hear him thinking, Is this chi
ck serious right now?

  I was—and so were the people at the rental office. The woman in charge took the magazine, looked at me, and said, “If Jet says it’s you, then it’s you.” She put keys on the counter and let us rent the van. Chris was shocked. Life in Harlem was like that, akin to a homecoming. I met my neighbors, walked in the park, and hopped on the A Train with Duke Ellington’s classic song of the same name playing in my headphones. In August, I performed “HarlemHoney” from my Smooth Is Spoken Here album on one of the main stages at the annual Harlem Week celebration of music, art, and culture. Afterward I received a plaque that said I was their very own HarlemHoney. That was another one of those moments when you could buy me for a penny and ask for change. The move felt complete when, like every New Yorker, Chris and I found a favorite Chinese restaurant, Crispy Bamboo.

  With Chris in Kansas City most of the summer, I worked on a variety of my own projects. I directed an episode of the CW series Eve, directed a couple concert events for BET Jazz, and played myself on the pilot of Lisa Kudrow’s deeply funny and ironic HBO series The Comeback. Between gigs, I tapped into the New York acting community. Our close friend Lee Summers, who had written the play Chris was in, was content director for a cool little theater on West 72nd Street called The Triad, and through him I met actors, writers, and directors for coffee, talked about plays, wrote scenes, and worked on pieces together. Unlike LA, where you stayed home and waited for the phone to ring, it was easy to stay connected in New York. I loved it.