Atlanta Noir

by Tayari Jones

  At home later, Leonard waited in the apartment, pacing back and forth, while Winona paced the floor overhead, steps clear and quick. She was wearing special clicking shoes, the sound had an echo. John James looked up at the ceiling where he expected to see the exact spot of each tap-tap-tap.

  Leonard caught him watching. He blew out a long breath, his nostrils widening a bit.

  You don’t have to worry about her, okay? He spoke in such a deep timber, how could anybody question a voice like that? Overhead the clip-clip-clip faded into background noise and all John James could hear was the sound of his own breathing, the bass of Leonard’s heartbeat, the ragged sawing sound the bed made, groaning back and forth. Yet still, his back on the bed, John James stared up at the ceiling, tracing the lines of old water stains in the plaster. He listened for the step-step-step in the aftermath, smelled the salty sweat on Leonard’s shoulder, tossed in the dampness of each other, pulling apart gradually.

  He was used to playing the part of Winona himself, so he could picture the tightness of her body as she walked from one wall to another, a hand across her waist, the other hanging loose. She had likely paced like this a lot of times in the past, every day that Leonard came home later than expected, every time he left the apartment and headed downstairs, every time he told her he was just stepping outside for some air, he would be right back. The frantic panic of the midsection, a hurt that can’t be held. Sitting then standing then sitting again. Standing at the window sometimes brought rest for a moment. But Leonard would fuck anybody he liked, and he would always come back to her as long as she never complained. John James knew that feeling inside out, backward and forward.

  But later in the night, when Leonard had gone upstairs again, there came a howling, an eerie sound that drawled on and on. Sometimes high-pitched words, sometimes only the sound. John James woke and heard it, a shivering through him, a feeling that his gut was sinking out of his body, his heart pounding then slowing, a smell of incense, sandalwood, biting his nostrils. All this time a stick of incense had been burning beside the bed. He snuffed it out with his fingertips. The fight upstairs grew quiet after a while.

  He had a day and a night of the usual voice in his head, Love is the whole object, the sole purpose, the full flowering, and on and on. Thinking of Leonard was enough to pass an hour in a kind of drugged haze, the warm feeling, the returning sensations, echoes from close at hand. Later he met Winona on the stairs to the basement, when he was returning to his room from doing a load of whites and she was carrying a basket of towels in her arms. She looked pert and neat, hair brushed and glossy, cardigan buttoned over a white blouse, a single fake gem on a fake gold necklace. Only when she looked at him, a veil dropped over her face and she passed him with two quick steps.

  * * *

  Later that night came a knock at his door, and he leaped up from the battered armchair, straightening the rug in the foyer with his foot. There was Molly the newly minted rock star—it was Molly in the doorway, and she was already talking. She had a magazine rolled up into a tight cylinder, and she gripped it in her fist as if it were trying to escape.

  I just need to dump all this on somebody, she said, and he said, You’re back already, and she said, I’ve been gone like five days, dude, and he said, I guess that’s right, and she said, Anyway, it was so wild, there’s no way even to describe it all.

  She flopped down on the couch, arms spread, legs spread, looking like a mannequin, for just a moment, splayed out there on the furniture.

  All these kids who liked our song came out to meet us at the airport, and we had people, you know, at the hotel, like. She pulled back her hair so that it was bundled into a little bouncing ponytail. She was looking at the ceiling as she spoke, tapping that magazine on the cushion of the couch. The airport part was great. And the gig was great. But then this critic wrote this review.

  Review?

  You know. In a magazine.

  Is that it? he asked.

  He did not have to ask which part of the review in the music magazine had upset her, since she had underlined it in green ink. Molly Harbinger is the lead singer of the band, striking if pudgy, round-faced like a moon girl, and she bounced up and down onstage like a happy puppy, thin hair flopping about, singing in that odd, striking voice.

  I’m pudgy, Molly said. And my face is round.

  The guy liked your voice, John said.

  I’m pudgy and my hair is thin, she said. She was looking right at him but she was not seeing anything at all. Her eyes were bloodshot. She sat oddly, with her elbows tucked close together and her hands on her cheeks; she looked as though she were trying to shrink herself.

  So they sat there while he studied the plaster cracks in the walls and she told him details about the trip in bits and snatches—the size of the crowd, the oddly bare hotel room, the people who recognized her in one of the hash shops. Always returning to the review, the way it made her feel afterward; singing in front of thousands of faces receding into the dark amphitheater, a moment like a dream, and then a couple days later there was this critique. And after reading it she was pudgy and moon-faced.

  The problem was that, sitting there, her sweatshirt riding up her midriff, a lip of belly poking over her jeans, she was the definition of pudgy, and her face was oddly round and large, like an owl. He could still see her on the cover of an indie-rock album, eyes outlined in black and lips bright red, hair spiked in all directions, leather around her neck, wearing tight black this-and-that, owning her image, working with it. But instead, the sight of herself in someone else’s eyes had frightened her, and here she sat.

  Then: the moment shifted when Leonard the boyfriend opened the door, not bothering to knock, because men like Leonard burst into rooms as though afire; and then: he walked into the apartment with a cool look at John James; and then: on the stairs stood Winona, howling something, and she flung herself into the door too, and the whole apartment building was now in John James’s living room, shouting and pandemonium, and poor Molly sitting in the chair looking lost.

  * * *

  Late in the night he woke in a strange room and had to think where he was and how he came to be there. Leonard lay beside him, smooth round shoulders, bare back in dim light from a television, the bright colors of a made-for-TV movie flickering over his skin. They were in Leonard’s bedroom. Winona lay on the far side of the bed. For a moment John James was back in the midst of what had happened, the three of them in here together, Leonard with a blank, satisfied smile as he took the other two onto the bed. They had done what Leonard asked, without question. John James pushed the memory away and felt a hint of sickness. He was watching Winona’s milk-dough bottom turned toward him, a slow slide of her buttock. He had never been so near a naked woman before.

  He raised out of bed trying to stir the covers only slightly. Rippling light and shadow fell over everything, masking his bits of motion as he stepped into his clothes. Still, he knew Winona was watching him, he was sure of it, sliding his shirt over his shoulders, carrying his shoes. When he reached the door he turned back to face her. There she lay on the edge of the mattress. She said nothing, only watched him, a sheet across her breasts, Leonard moving unconsciously toward her as he slept, the two of them soon entwined. A line of beer bottles, perfectly spaced, stood guard on the floor. In each bottle was reflected a tiny television screen, mottles of dark moving in all the bright frames.

  What if his face was in there somewhere, in that moving pattern of white and gray and black, the person he saw himself becoming someday, prosperous, generous, beloved? Whereas tonight, what the glass reflected: shamefaced, he skulked along a wall, watching the floor.

  Easing the front door closed, he stepped onto the landing and heard a sound from Molly’s apartment across the way. The stereo played Pony Pony, loud for four in the morning. Her front door was open. He almost sneaked past it, slipping down the stairs, but instead stepped over to her doorway and stood in it. She was still sitting in the chair, a fifth of
bourbon beside her, tilted a bit but not yet enough to spill. She was looking out at the room heavy-lidded, both hands on her bare belly, rubbing like a Buddha. The music magazine lay at her feet, open to the picture of her at the microphone, one leg in the air, moving like a rag doll.

  She had been crying but now her eyes were dry. She looked at him as if he had been standing there all along. I thought I would be so happy, she said.

  For John James, the words cut into him as if he were speaking them too. He sat with her till she closed her eyes and drifted away. Kneeling at the stereo, he looked for the button to turn off the tape, and quiet flooded the room. No more purple night. He stood and watched Molly for a while, then walked down the stairs to his own apartment, and closed the door, and waited in the dark.

  Ma’am

  by Alesia Parker

  Midtown

  Lorraine didn’t know who could be knocking on her door that sunny spring morning. It never ceased to amaze her how many people came knocking on a person’s door in the middle of the day. For most of her life, she had been at work from nine to five like all decent hardworking people, so she had no idea how busy a person’s doorstep could get during working hours. She didn’t miss her work, though, as being a secretary wasn’t exactly her dream job. But truth be told, Lorraine had never dreamed of jobs. She dreamed of husbands, and she had done very well for herself. Councilman Nathaniel Booker Hightower was primed to become the next mayor of Atlanta, and Lorraine was more than ready to glide into the role of first lady.

  She shook her head and smiled at the wonder of it all. Being a “lady” at all was something of a triumph, considering where she came from. She’d graduated from Washington High School forty years earlier with nothing but good looks and a paper certifying that she could type eighty words per minute. And now look at her, home at eleven o’clock in the morning ironing the wool suit she would wear to the press conference announcing her husband’s mayoral run. Who could believe that she was once a fast-tail girl from John Hope Homes?

  There was that knock again. It couldn’t be the Witnesses. It’d been a long time since they’d come knocking. It was a waste of their time, as Lorraine never answered the door. Most of them knew not to even bother her, but every now and then one of them liked a challenge. She turned her attention back to the Italian double-crepe wool skirt. She had made it herself. Nothing pleased her more than being asked where she purchased her clothes and she could say, This? Oh, I made it myself. Domestic science is what they use to call this sort of thing, back in Jackie Kennedy’s day, back when homemaking was still an art. The suit matched the soft lavender necktie that Booker would be wearing for the announcement.

  Whoever was at the door wasn’t going to give up. The knock this time was the age-old shave-and-a-haircut. The Witnesses were never so lighthearted. Lorraine set the iron down on the ironing board, walked over to the door, and parted the curtain sheers covering the door window with her finger. She froze, then she snatched her finger back from the curtain as if she had mistakenly touched the hot iron she’d just been using. She stood still, holding her breath deep in her chest, hoping he hadn’t seen the movement of the curtain.

  “I know you’re there, Raine,” a familiar voice sang. The low chuckle that followed was equally telling. “I hear the television on. You watching The Price Is Right like you always do ’round this time. And I saw the curtain move. So you might as well open the door.”

  Lorraine leaned her forehead against the doorjamb, more to balance her swirling thoughts than to still her needy body. This was the part of being a housewife they didn’t teach in home economics classes. She slowly opened the door.

  “Jonathan, I asked you not to come check on me anymore. We can’t do this. We can’t, you know that. You know I’m—”

  “Yes, yes, I know you’re the wife of the future mayor of Atlanta. I understand that. You made that painfully clear.”

  Lorraine’s breath quickened at the sight of Jonathan; she hadn’t seen him in six months. She only heard the steady whine of his mail truck as he drove from mailbox to mailbox. For a couple of months she made sure she was in the back of the house so she couldn’t hear his approach. The very sound of that vehicle trundling down the road caused a beading of sweat on her forehead and in other unmentionable places.

  There was a time she leaped with joy at the sound of his mail truck. She first heard it when he was delivering mail to the houses on the opposite side of the street. That gave her enough time to be waiting for him at her own mailbox with a glass of cold lemonade in the summer or a cup of hot coffee during the cold winter days.

  And Jonathan appreciated her kindness. He flashed the same gap-toothed smile he had as a boy. He was a man now, a far cry from the little boy who played Little League at Adams Park and sang in the choir at Mount Vernon Baptist. She even remembered when he used to call her Miss Lorraine.

  The provision of refreshments to her mailman was innocent enough. She enjoyed talking to him and reliving their early years, even as he placed bills and circulars in her hand. It was amazing how much he remembered, seeing that he was twenty-five years her junior. Jonathan even began circling back around to her house a couple of days a week to have lunch with her. Lorraine looked forward to his company, as her husband traveled more than he was home.

  One day they were talking in the kitchen after lunch together, just before it was time for him to finish up his route. She reached over to brush a few crumbs of the coffee cake they’d just eaten from his beard. Jonathan grabbed her hand and gently kissed her fingertips. Kissed fingertips quickly and easily became kissed lips.

  It was all very romantic, very Postman Always Rings Twice, Lorraine Gets Her Groove Back—every cliché in the book. Lorraine figured she was entitled to a little extracurricular affection, as Booker was gone from home so much you would have thought he was a traveling salesman, rather than a city councilman. And was there not a long tradition of refined ladies who took on discrete lovers? Maybe even Jackie Kennedy herself took special liberties, if only in her deep secret thoughts. And this thing of beauty could have gone on forever, but Jonathan, young and dumb, wanted to take it to the next level.

  “We could be together, Lorraine,” he said that night she told him the affair was over. “Like really be together. No more hiding.”

  Lorraine smiled at him the way you would smile at a child who tells you he wants to be an astronaut. “I’m going to be first lady of Atlanta, you know that.”

  “You’re not happy,” he said. “You know that.” Suddenly he snatched the satin sheets from the bed, leaving her naked and exposed. “You think I don’t notice the keloid scars, the bruises? The remnants are still there, even though you claim he only abused you early in your marriage. I can still see them. I love every inch of your body. How can I not see how much he’s hurting you?”

  Lorraine pulled the covers back around herself. “It’s over, Jonathan. We had a deal: you don’t ask me about my life and I don’t ask about yours.”

  Now he seemed like the boy she had known and fallen for. “But I love you, Raine. How can I love you and not ask questions?”

  That was over six months ago. And here Jonathan stood now on her front porch with questions swimming in his beautiful hazel eyes.

  “Jonathan,” she sighed, taking firm hold of the reins of her memories, of her desire for him, and resisting the urge to run her fingers through his curly hair that shone dark red in the sunlight. “You have to go. I just can’t do this anymore.”

  “Not going before you sign for this mail,” he said.

  “What?”

  Jonathan shook the bright yellow envelope. “Mail. You have mail. I’m the mailman, remember? I deliver the mail, rain or shine.”

  “You could’ve just left it in the mailbox,” Lorraine said, her voice more heady than it should have been. She took a deep breath just to calm herself. “Next time, just leave it there.”

  Jonathan smiled. “Like I said, you have to sign for it. I have to do
my job first. I have to love you later, from afar and forever.”

  Lorraine signed her name, her hand shaking like a drug user itching for another hit. One more good time before quitting for good, her body whined. This was another experience she had shoved far behind her, though. Drugs, hits, pretty young boys, the angst of just about every sad movie on any given cable channel made especially for women. Now she was living a new life that stretched out in front of her like a yellow-brick road. All she had to do was stay on the path, and stay out of the dusty back rooms of her heart.

  She shoved the clipboard at him. And it didn’t help that Jonathan was slow to possess it, taking the time to touch her shivering hand. His touch was like wind gently blowing on smoldering ashes, threatening to ignite them into the raging wildfire they once were. It didn’t help that the actual wind carried the scent of his aftershave straight to her head. She had purchased the same scent for Booker, but on her husband’s skin the scent was brackish and sharp.

  Jonathan took the clipboard from her hands and backed away. “Thank you, ma’am.” He stood on the top step of the porch and looked out over the street. “You know I have my differences with your husband, but I have to admit that he gets things done. Just look here at these streets. Bricks instead of asphalt. If I didn’t know better, I would think this was a white neighborhood.”

  “Permeable pavers,” Lorraine said.

  “Say what?” He turned to face her.

  “They’re permeable pavers. They solve the flooding problems in our neighborhood.”

  Jonathan chuckled. “Solving problems. I guess that’s a good thing, that’s progress. Problems get solved when white folks start moving into the neighborhood, right?”

  “Don’t say that. My husband represents all the residents of this neighborhood. That’s why he’s going to be the next mayor.” She wanted to say more, but she was suddenly captivated by the lone wiry gray hair in Jonathan’s beard. She’d snatched it out many a night with her own teeth.