So this was the mix Mae favored—a touch of high society from the Millses, respectable blood relative in Gladys, and handsome men to dress up the table. The rest of the room was stocked with the city’s leading black politicians, doctors, lawyers, and real estate brokers. Every so often a journalist managed to slip in as someone’s guest but no one liked an overt eavesdropper, so few were invited to return.
Gladys spoke nonstop, which ensured awkward pauses never dampened the table. She sipped her champagne and chattered away. Mae nodded, her head tilted toward her cousin with false intimacy, but already she was searching the room. Perhaps it was the feel of the gold dress against her thighs, or the perception of her own glowing, but Mae was in the mood to take in something special tonight. She didn’t know what she wanted, though, and when she felt this way she was liable to take a man just because she could. Then later she’d regret it because he would turn out not to be worth the trouble and worse—not up to her standards.
Then the music changed and she heard him—the band had a new singer. She had never heard a voice so smooth, so rich. She forced herself to not look at him, but his voice seemed to pull her his way. She sent her white flare smile out to the room and even managed to converse a little with Gladys, but the singer poured honey in her ears all the while.
How many times had she heard “Nature Boy” in this room? What was so different about him? The song sounded bare, stripped down. When Mae finally gave in and allowed herself a glance she paused.
He was so young.
His smooth, fair skin shone and the stage lights made him angelic. He seemed to smile as he sang, drawing contentment from his music. His soft reddish curls framed his forehead. His body, strong and broad, anchored her eyes to the stage. The rest of the band listened as he sang accompanied only by the piano, bass, and simple rhythm guitar. Mae forced herself to turn away and picked up her champagne glass but still she listened.
The greatest thing you’ll ever learn
Is just to love and be loved in return.
He sang the last lines like he believed the words. Did he really? She wanted to know and she wanted to know firsthand.
“What did you say about Cecily?” Mae leaned toward her cousin, determined to feign interest.
“I said she got up here on Thursday. From North Carolina.”
“Why didn’t you bring her tonight?”
“Here?” Gladys pulled her silk stole back up over her beefy brown shoulders. “Oh, honey, that girl’s eyes would pop right out of her head before she even got her butt in that chair good. Then they’d be rolling around the room all night. She’s been down South so long it’ll take a while for her to get used to this kind of society. That’s why I want you to talk to her a little. You can help her.”
Mae doubted that. Her cousin’s daughter was, at least when Mae last saw her, a gangly colt of a girl with big, dark, empty eyes. Mae found the thought of her dull. The fact that she had spent the past year on a farm in the South made her even more so.
“Cecily will be fine. She’ll figure things out just like we all did growing up.”
“Yes, but she doesn’t have that kind of time. She’s gonna be married not too long from now.”
The fold of a tiny frown dented Mae’s brow. “Married? Gladys, what are you talking about? She’s so young.”
“She’s young, but not too young to get into trouble. And with all the money she’s gonna have, the good-for-nothing men around here will get her before you know it.”
Mae’s fingers grasped her glass and she had to be careful she didn’t crush the crystal in her hand. It was 1947. Why did their families think a black girl with money had to be tied to some older man like a store-bought daddy? Maybe, she thought, there were too many dirty old men too happy for the privilege. She had endured Brantwell Davis as a husband because he was quiet and suitably in love with her. The Howard-educated fool also happened to own many of the stores stocking the Malveaux products, which is why her mother thought him a good choice. But Mae didn’t mourn when he toppled over in church, dead of a heart attack. She snatched back her maiden name within weeks of his funeral. “Well, then, who’s going to marry her?”
“A respectable man with money of his own,” Gladys said, raising her glass with a triumphant smirk. “Someone who will appreciate a good girl for what she is.”
“And who exactly is that?”
“Frank Washington. Here he is right now.”
Mae followed Gladys’s gaze and saw Frank striding toward them, his arms out as though he were about to embrace them both. A chill ran down her bare shoulders and into her arms. Ice crystals blossomed on the surface of her skin. She couldn’t believe the man had the audacity to come at her smiling like he was about to sell her Edgecombe Avenue. He knew better than to be familiar with her in public. But this fearless flaunting told her he didn’t think she had a hold on him anymore.
They had been lovers once, good ones too. He appreciated her power, her money, and her instinct. He thought her shrewd to be so discreet in her relationships. He was happy to sleep with her but knew to be careful in public places. Still, she collected the usual insurance, as she did with all her lovers: little secrets, bits of information she knew were supposed to go no further than their bed. She always knew exactly where and how a man could be hurt so he wouldn’t dare go boasting he’d had Mae Malveaux. Frank loved his position in society just as much as she did. He loved appearances even more. But he seemed to accept the terms of their relationship too cheerfully. She felt she always had to drop tiny hints to remind him of what she knew about his business—the illegitimate child he’d sent off to grow up daddy-less in Pittsburgh; the quiet payments he made to appraisers who valued properties the way he wanted them to.
Of the tiringly large number of marriage proposals she’d received since her husband’s death, Frank’s was the only one she would have considered with a serious mind. The base of his money was old and respectable. He had been born in New York and so had his parents. But then he had the ambition to make money of his own in this new Harlem, putting together real estate deals. He had helped half the churches in acquiring new property, often from him. And he had some flair, and enough of his own interests that he wouldn’t always be around and stifling her.
Only Frank never proposed. She remembered that final night in his bed when she’d thought he’d been about to ask. They’d been talking about marriage and she had been half listening, already planning how to string out her indecision, how she would hold him on the threshold of anticipation every day, possibly for months, before finally saying yes.
“Everyone up here looks down on the South,” he had said, lying back with his hands under his head. “I think it would be the best place in the world to get married.”
“Well, yes, but why would you think that?” She didn’t want a country wedding where they served corn pone and molasses.
“That’s the only place you can find a girl, a really good girl. The women up here, even the young ones, know too much. They seen too much. A girl from a good family in the South would be pure as the driven snow. I’m gonna marry a girl like that someday.”
Mae had had to work hard to absorb the shock of his words. Her fist had gripped the sheet into a ball and pulled it around her naked body, but she’d pretended to be getting up to get dressed as usual. She’d smiled, but cooled to him after that. She’d placed a kind of formality between them and finally, when she felt enough time had passed for him not to connect the event with her current action, she’d told him it was over. His complacency had made her burn. He hadn’t asked why. He’d simply shaken her hand like he was walking away from a poker buddy. By the end of the week he was strutting arm in arm with that fat Delia Song, who used to run around with Val Jackson.
NOW HE WAS coming at her grinning because he’d found his Southern-fried virgin at last. Mae wanted to leap out of her skin and tear his throat open. Instead she smiled as she would to any admirer.
“Good evening,
Mrs. Vaughn, Miss Malveaux.”
Gladys beamed. “Hello, Frank, it’s so good to see you! I want you to know Cecily is home safe and sound. She’ll be in church tomorrow morning if you want to see her. She’s gonna be so happy to see you again!”
Those last words felt like a big lie and the weight of them made Mae’s eye twitch come on. She drew on her cigarette and turned away to blow the smoke into the air.
“That would be nice, thank you,” said Frank. “It’s good to know she’s home where she belongs.”
He turned to Mae. “Miss Malveaux, I have it on good authority the band is readying ‘Lady of the Lavender Mist.’ Would you like to dance it with me?”
Now she boiled because he had put her in an impossible situation. He was being much too familiar, wanting not only to dance, but to her favorite music no less! What was he out to prove tonight? She mashed her cigarette into a crystal ashtray and stared at him. He seemed to recognize the look because he immediately dipped his head into a slight bow and added, “If you don’t mind putting up with a clumsy old fool like me.”
She gave him a small, tight smile and nodded. Frank was a very good dancer and he knew it. She could say yes to his offer; he would pay too much attention to how good he looked on the floor. She once teased him that he should have been onstage, had missed his calling as a performer.
He waited as though he wanted an invitation to sit down but Mae looked past him and sipped from her glass. Finally he bowed again to Gladys’s grinning and nodding and slunk off.
“When?” Mae asked Gladys.
“When what, honey?”
Mae moved her glass toward Joe-Joe for more champagne. “When will you have the wedding?”
Gladys’s eyes widened as though she were a child and Mae had mentioned Christmas. “In about six months or so. Maybe even New Year’s Day.”
“New Year’s Day?” Ed asked. He glanced at his wife—her mouth shrunk into a knot like she’d tasted something sour. “A lot of people still hold superstitions around New Year’s.” Then he laughed. “They might be afraid to leave home that day.”
“Oh, they’ll be there.” Gladys waved a hand through the air. “Frank wants a big wedding even if we have to serve enough collards and black-eyed peas to feed half of Harlem.”
“Of course he does,” Mae said.
The information sealed her decision. She would crush Frank’s plan. But how to do it? Yes, she had enough influence with her cousin to dissuade her from the marriage—it would take only a few well-placed hints or concerns. However, Mae wanted more. She wanted Frank’s humiliation, to have him walk through Harlem with laughter trailing in his wake. She wanted his hypocrisy exposed, his name thoroughly ridiculed. That might be enough for her.
By the time she heard the first strains of the Duke Ellington tune and Frank Washington came over to claim her, Mae had made her plans. This allowed her to accept his hand graciously and take the dance floor in his arms. The grinning dummy couldn’t fathom what was to come, and she was determined to make him pay for his ignorance.
The other couples made room for them and Mae was glad because she was closer to the band and she knew the singer would be able to look at her. She danced for him. Frank spun her around and dipped her. She arched her back a tiny fraction more. Her chest plumed upward. When she came up again she felt full, full of strategies and opportunities. If Frank had lifted her at that moment she was certain she could have flown. Then he swung her out and she faced the singer dead-on. She sent the young crooner a look of asking and light and yearning. She knew he caught it because he was nearly a half beat late coming in with the next verse. She heard a tickle in his voice that proved him unnerved. He would want to know more. She had him. She would send her man Lawrence to retrieve him.
Suddenly Mae knew she would take this singer to Paris, even if he had been there before. She would make it all new for him. He would sing “Nature Boy” for her, just as he did it tonight, and he would teach her what those last two lines meant for him, why he could sing them the way he did, like he really believed the words were the secret he had been put on earth to discover. Was he really young enough to think like that? She would turn his spotlight on herself and absorb all these mysteries, if they did indeed exist in him. It was worth the exploration. At worst, he would turn out to be like any other man. She would enjoy him nonetheless.
Frank spun her around again and in the corner of her eye she noticed a tall dark-skinned man trotting down the grand staircase with the grace of an athlete.
Val Jackson had arrived.
It was just like him, she thought, to enter the Swan midsong, when the dance floor was full and the focus away from the stairs. But then he seemed to enjoy blending into crowds unnoticed. He frequented baseball games, and—where had she first met him? On a busy concourse at the World’s Fair in 1939. In other ways, more important ways, he was like her. Soon the room would fill with whispers and she’d feel them like a breeze changing direction. She needed only a quick glance over Frank’s shoulder to see how good Val looked tonight. French cuffs gleamed from the sleeves of his tuxedo, matching the wattage of his smile, a smile that seemed like a miracle in the way it made his ebony-dark skin glow. Not many men could smile like that and not look like a fool.
Of course she wanted Val, how could she not? He was everything she was—wealthy, gorgeous, and, best of all, keenly aware the world had been made just for him. He walked through life the way Mae thought a black man should, not as someone who always had something to prove, but as someone who wanted everyone else to prove why they were worth his attention. Freedom filled Val Jackson and he wasn’t afraid to see the world from his high advantage and act on it. More important, he wasn’t afraid of Mae, and this endeared him to her forever.
Val, like her, feared no one. Val didn’t see her as someone to be conquered. He recognized her at once as a superior, and even appreciated how she had to be better, craftier, and smarter than he did because she was a woman. She loved him for being the only one who could endure the shining hard reality of her. She never slept with him—she had her reasons for this—but Mae and Val were each ravenous for an equal. They affirmed each other, proved the way they saw the world was true and that they were indeed gods, not false deities created in their own minds. Though they stayed carefully separated socially, she held Val close to her and never strayed far from him in her thoughts. She even cheered him on from afar. They were on a tremendous walk around the world, and she had no doubt he would meet her again when they were done with all the specious pursuits and ready to complete their journey together. She was certain, so certain, Val would be her last, sweetest, and final lover.
Mae did want love. She didn’t care that it didn’t last, didn’t care how easily it could be broken. What she cared about was how every human being seemed to walk the earth clutching at love, but she couldn’t do the same. She knew that shouldn’t matter—she didn’t want to be so ridiculous and so weak—yet she did desire love if only to have it in her hands, a rare bauble she could enjoy as she studied its strange hold on the world. But for Mae some entity always held love, ripe and shining, just out of her reach, letting her know with soul-slicing certainty that she wasn’t good enough to have it.
The only person she had ever truly loved, Alice, had loved Mae enough to warn her about this. She had seen the work of Mae’s mother—the cultivating and promoting of Mae’s beauty, sending her daughter to sit in drawing rooms in the capitals of Europe, the search for a safe and respectable man for her to marry—all this would keep Mae from being mistreated and misplaced in the world, safe from the human frailties of hunger, want, greed, and need. But it also meant she was safe—painfully, genuinely, horrifically safe—from love.
When the dance with Frank was over she glowed with the delicious feeling she always had when assured she could have anything she wanted. She didn’t even care if anyone thought the look came from dancing with Frank. She signaled for a waiter to summon Lawrence, who hung out near the ki
tchen anticipating her requests. In this moment of distraction she failed to notice Frank planting himself at her table. Already he was jawing at Gladys about Cecily and apologizing for how he would be away at least part of the summer on business. His hot air clouded the table. Mae took another cigarette and leaned over to Joe-Joe so he could light it.
She ignored Frank and focused instead on Val at the bar across the room. She watched him with her own interests at heart. She envied not the girl he paid attention to, but the way he could stalk his conquest so openly and be feared and admired for it. A woman couldn’t do that and remain respectable. She had to be so much smarter. Lawrence came to the table and leaned in close so she could whisper directions to him.
Her tablemates were talking about the weather. Mae cringed.
“It’s not as hot as it could be,” Gladys was saying to Flo. “That’s why I told Rose Jarreau I couldn’t bring Cecily for a visit. So much to do with her before the season starts.”
“Yes.” Flo nodded. “She’s so lucky to have a mama like you.”
“Well, I told Rose if it gets hot again she’ll see us before a drop of my sweat can hit the ground.”
Polite laughter rolled around the table.
“Mae, why haven’t you gone to the country?” asked Ed.
She smiled. “Now, why would I do that when all of you are here?”
“And that house of yours is air cooled,” noted Gladys. “No need to run up out of the city.”
“Besides, Gladys,” Mae went on, “dear Cecily has already missed so much like you said. I want to do all I can to help her catch up.” She looked Frank directly in the eye. “Yes, all I can.”
Frank coughed nervously then sighed and stood. “I think I’ll go have a word with Ike Dunbar. Excuse me, everyone. Enjoy your evening.”
Mae nodded silently and watched him retreat. Something other than anger rose in her and she was enjoying it. She was on the precipice of something exquisite requiring all her formidable powers. One man, this young man, she would have. With the other, Frank, she would trod upon his desire like a worm under her heel. And she would use Val Jackson to do it. It wouldn’t be enough to expose Frank’s bastard or his shady business dealings. She had to destroy what he desired—or at least the feature he wanted most. The thought that she could orchestrate this while taking another lover made her feel like a man. She felt a glorious ache between her legs and she pressed her thighs together. Wasn’t this what men did when they felt disrespected? And was she any less worthy of respect than a man? Frank had to learn this. It was important for anyone whom she allowed into her realm to understand this—you crossed her at a price.
Unforgivable Love Page 3