Blues Dancing

by Diane McKinney-Whetstone

  A mild orange warmth crackled from the fireplace in this expansive room that was originally the living room. They’d turned it into their bedroom at Rowe’s insistence, though, because of the fireplace, and marble-topped mantel, and chair rail and crown molding that were never-ending, and the oversized built-in mahogany bookcases, and the floor-to-ceiling picture windows that looked out on a centuries-old beech and a trio of Victorian singles—that scene through the windows was such a postcard when it snowed that they actually took a picture one year and used it as a cover for their holiday greeting. Back then they’d agreed that this room was too perfect to be formal; had far too much capacity for a hearth-type ambience to be wasted on an occasional wine-and-cheese gathering, the intermittent burst of company, maybe a Christmas Eve by the fireplace. No, no, they would sleep in this room, and watch TV and listen to music, and read and study and compete with the fireplace to see which could give off the most heat because back then, when Verdi was so needy and Rowe so competent, they made their own fires dance.

  Right now it was the slow bluesy dance of the real fire that Verdi focused on as she stepped all the way into the bedroom and looked at the back of Rowe’s head and tried to keep the oh-shit, I’m-caught grimace from taking over her face. She hadn’t even planned out what she would say to Rowe until right now as she walked all the way into the room.

  There Rowe sat wide-awake in the forest-green velvet chair, his shadow billowed to twice his size on the wall behind him and then shrank and went amorphous in the fire’s dance. His feet were propped casually on the ottoman, his robe open revealing his plain white boxers and matching sleeveless undershirt, his chest muscles taut under his skin that didn’t know whether it wanted to be light or dark. The edges of the robe touched the neat stacks of journals extending up from the floor like a gate—or fortress—on both sides of the chair. His reading glasses were riding the tip of his polite nose, the glasses were black and picked up the black in his hair that hadn’t yet gone completely to gray, like most things about him were showing evidence of the slow, steady trek from young to old, though he worked out with religious regularity, was careful to eat mostly by-the-book heart-healthy foods, even dabbled in melatonin, and chromium, St. John’s wort and ginseng on the side; he was getting to sixty, could feel the increased pull of gravity trying to force his shoulder muscles to the ground, his waist, his abs, even his manhood threatened to take part in the descent made all the more dreaded because Verdi was younger than him by a full twenty years.

  She walked across the bedroom and leaned down and kissed his brow. “You still up, babes,” she whispered as she peeled her lips from the soft creases in his brow. She couldn’t tell if he was grimacing out of anger or concern or maybe the creases just came up as a question mark with no particular emotion attached. Something about the feel of his wrinkled forehead against her mouth caused her to decide right then that she’d tell him where she’d really been. She’d brace herself for the spewing out of bad adjectives about her cousin that would surely follow, but she at least owed him her honesty. “I tried to slip in so I wouldn’t wake you, isn’t tomorrow your early class with all the smart-asses?”

  “Now, how can I go to sleep without my pet next to me,” he answered. He hadn’t called her pet in years. It was the nickname he’d used when their love time was a secret, when she was still a student, when he still lived with his wife, when everything about them being together was so inappropriate that she couldn’t stop herself from shaking she’d be so nervous, he’d tease her, call her his teacher’s pet while he squeezed and caressed and loosened her up so that her natural desires could come down. He grabbed her hand now and held on and pulled her down to sit on his lap. “After twenty years with me, you must know my most important bedtime rule, I never ever close my eyes until I know where you are?” He unbuttoned the cuff of her left sleeve as he spoke. “So if you ever want to cause my demise, just stay away from home around bedtime, I’ll quickly succumb to sleep deprivation, because trust me, Pet, I won’t sleep. No, no, I won’t sleep.”

  “I—I was going to call you, Rowe,” she stammered as he began to roll her sleeve up past her elbow.

  “Don’t explain, just tell me where you were.” He worked his ability to modulate his voice regardless of the maelstrom that might be kicking up on the inside. Right now his voice was soothing, gently persuasive, an acute contrast to the thunder moving through his body. He pressed his thumb against the inside of her arm and dragged his thumb the length of her arm right along the vein. He had to grit his teeth to hold himself at bay so that he wouldn’t break her arm because in that instant he wanted to wrench it from its socket, hurl it around like a baton on fire for making him worry like this. The past three hours he’d almost exploded with the fear that finally she’d gone and done it, she’d reverted to the ways that he’d saved her from back in the seventies during her undergraduate days that culminated, or descended, to that day when he’d found her in the men’s bathroom of the history department, her prizewinning face kissing the vomit sliding down the base of the urinal. And he’d scooped her up and rushed her home with him, where he and his then-wife, Penda, spoon-fed her clear broth, and coke syrup, and turned the heat up and down in response to her fever and chills, and finally resurrected the cherub-cheeked girl she’d once been. And even though Rowe fell in love with the restored version of her, he’d never really let go of the impending-doom kind of anxiety that Verdi might leave him—after all he’d done for her, given up for her—that she might relinquish it all for that powerful call that had dragged her down the first time. But her veins were smooth, no raised places like there used to be during their early time together when he’d rub her arms nightly with cocoa butter and kiss her veins, and tell the marks to be gone. He tilted her arm toward the light of the goose-neck lamp just to make sure. He glanced at her but she was looking away, a humiliation falling off her face that made the skin on her face seem to sag. He hated to have to inspect her like that, hated to have to remind her of what she used to be, what she still had the potential to be. But he had to know, he reasoned. He was her protector, after all. But now he was sorry seeing the skin on her face fall, and he pressed his lips against her unblemished vein and kissed and licked at it and told her how much he loved her arms, how much he loved her, now where was she, just tell him where she’d been from this afternoon until midnight.

  And now she was crying; not sobbing, but a soft quiet kind of cry. He knew it was because of the way he’d just examined her arm. And her soft tears falling on the arm that he held under the lamp melted him and he pulled her against his chest and covered her up in the robe, and told her that it was okay, wherever she’d been, it was okay. He just had to know. Certainly she must understand that she was the only weakness he had on earth.

  Her skin beaded in chill bumps at how he’d just prodded her arm as if she were a patient at a methadone clinic, better that he had asked her to pee in a cup. Her shame at his thumb tracing the familiarity of her veins turned to anger, and now just as quickly as her resolve to be honest with him about how she’d spent her evening with Kitt and Posie and Sage had come, it dissipated, cloistered now in the chill bumps in her skin, and she didn’t feel like listening to him rail against her only cousin after all. “I went in town,” she said as she sniffed and tried to dry out her voice.

  “Until midnight?” he asked, his lips coming up from the space between her shoulder and neck so that he could see her.

  “Actually, as it turned out, yes.” She sat up and let the edges of his robe fall against the journals. She rarely lied to Rowe. Rarely had to. Occasionally she’d tell him that a suit cost two hundred dollars that actually cost four, or that the mayo in the tuna salad was nonfat when it was actually a hundred percent real grease; she’d lied more by omission than commission often about visiting Kitt by just forgetting to mention it as something she’d done on a given day. But she’d never fabricated an entire scene after the fact as she was getting ready to do, ad-libbing de
tail along the way. Never looked him straight in the eye as she was doing now, propped on his lap, making her own eyes go innocent and girlish in that downward slant to distract him from her words. She began to feel the manifestation of the lie in her body. Not as a shame, or embarrassment even, but as a ripple building and spreading out like foreplay, an excitement racing through her, softening those chill bumps on her skin to an oily sweat.

  She started unbuttoning her blouse. “I had to hunt for the candy eggs for my little ones, you know how special they are to me. From one store to the next I trounced until I found some nice ones already in cute little flowered boxes. And then I couldn’t decide on lipstick shades, maybe it was the rain, baby.” She put a moan to her voice as she yanked the edges of her blouse from her skirt. “Honestly, I went from Fashion Fair to Clinique to Chanel, everything was too red or too purple or too shiny. How ’bout you go with me Saturday, I just couldn’t make up my mind tonight.”

  “Well, the stores close at nine-thirty,” he said, trying not to be distracted as Verdi undid her other sleeve cuff and let the blouse fall from her shoulders.

  “Then I got a manicure, don’t my nails look good.” She played a piano in the air under his reading glasses, grateful that Kitt had taken such care with her nails.

  He looked at the buffed, straight-across evenness of her nails, and she felt the prodding of his eyes against her hands and dared him in her head to put those under the light too. “I got them done at Topper’s, before you ask, since I feel like I’m being interrogated here.” She hadn’t meant for her sarcasm to slip through.

  “Look, Verdi, I was out of my mind with worry,” he said. “You come in here this time of night without any empathy for the torture you put me through, without at least even trying to understand all the wretched places my mind must have gone after nine-thirty came and went.”

  She fixed her eyes on him again. “I’m sorry,” she cooed, “God knows I am.”

  “I was just out of my mind with worry.” He said it with finality, as if to convince himself as much as her. Told her that she would have every right to act as he just had if his history with her had given her cause for such concern. Her eyes were starting to well up again and he could no longer retain his weakness where he held it now, deep in his belly muscles that were sore from him contracting them so. He let his belly go flaccid, unhinged his arms. “My sweet, sweet Verdi,” he said as he put his lips to her fingers. Then he took her fingers in his mouth. “Mnh, they do look so good,” he said as he made sucking sounds against her fingers. “Everything about you is so good.”

  She felt his manhood rising against her as she gently urged her fingers from his mouth, pulled her bra straps down one at a time, streaking his spit down her chest as she did. She reached behind to her back to undo the clasps. She stared straight at him as she did, beyond the tip of his nose where his reading glasses still hung, right into his eyes that had that sweaty, starved look. “Well, while I was getting my nails done I heard them saying that the last full-body massage scheduled for nine-thirty had just canceled. And I said what the hell, mnh, you know, baby. I work hard. You do too, you know you should treat yourself to a full-body sometime.”

  She was purring now as her bra fell and landed on the journals and he grabbed at her chest with his hands, and pulled her down to continue with his lips what he’d just done with his hands.

  “And then it took me forever to get a cab, mnh, baby, the cabs are so slow, mnh, so slow around Topper’s.”

  He fought to stay focused. To hear the rest of where she’d been, to pick her words apart for signs of deceit, but her voice was going right in his ear, hot like her breath, and now she was moving against him in slow, hard circles. And now she lifted her skirt up to her waist and straddled herself over him and made the circles faster and more intense until his manhood protruded through the slit in his boxers. She pressed harder against him, and he thought, Topper’s, of course, she was just at Topper’s getting a manicure and massage, Topper’s kept later hours on Wednesdays after all. And in that instant right before he exploded he would have believed her if she’d said she’d just gone to the moon.

  And later that night, after they moved from the green velvet chair to the bed and had fallen asleep wrapped up in one another pretzel-style—at least Rowe had fallen asleep—Verdi was wide-awake listening to Rowe’s raucous, inconsistent snoring, and thinking about what she’d wear to work, and her agenda for the next day’s staff meeting, and how she should handle her backstabbing vice principal, and a new teaching technique she was going to start using with Sage, and the budget projections due to the headmaster, and the exact color of purple and green grasses she wanted for her children’s baskets, and damn, wasn’t that some good corn bread Kitt had made just like that from scratch; deeply padded between all of those can’t-get-to-sleep middle-of-the-night thoughts, when the trifles take the same weight as the grave as they all crowd for space in her head, she untangled herself from Rowe. She kissed his chin because she truly cared for him, owed him so much, owed him her life.

  She shifted and yawned and turned her back to Rowe, felt clammy and warm and threw the covers to Rowe’s side of the bed, pressed her eyes trying to hurry sleep, but instead felt that dip in her heart that she thought had callused over years ago since Johnson had left Philadelphia, but now, suddenly, pulsed with an intensity and a beat that she thought must be what her aunt Posie felt when she’d break out into a sweat as she described the smell of butter walking alone through the nighttime fog.

  Verdi and Johnson were connected from the start the way that the leaf and the root of the same plant are connected. She was accustomed to catching the sun with her welcoming southern ways, the pampered only child of a prosperous preacher and his wife. He was more at home pushing in the dirt, a city boy, clinically depressed mother, father who’d left when Johnson was ten. She was adept at sustaining a blossom, used to being pointed at, look how pretty she is, how smart, how sweet, isn’t she sweet. He knew things though, tentacled underground, knew things in a deep way.

  She’d met him back in 1971 her first evening on campus where she’d felt isolated and strange all day with her white hall mates, in small but significant ways. She had a single room and they’d knocked on her door incessantly to introduce themselves, said if she felt lonely not having a roommate just yell. And they were friendly enough until one of them asked if she could show her how to iron a pillowcase, and Verdi said she didn’t know how, and then she asked Verdi if she could please call her mother surely she must know how. Another one asked her if she could just comb her hair over the third sink, her hair was so thick surely it would repeatedly stop up the drain and that way there would still be open sinks while they waited for a plumber.

  So she felt a sense of falling into place as she sifted into the meeting of the Black Students’ League. The air was warm and close to her skin as she edged along the wall looking for someplace to sit, or at least stand. There were a minimum of seventy people crammed in here, mostly huge-Afroed; mostly wearing frayed, wrinkled jeans topped with dashikis, or tie-dyed shirts adorned with red, black, and green beaded chokers, or peace signs; T-shirts hollered out from all over the room emblazoned with maps of Africa, or fists pointing skyward, or Huey Newton sitting stalwart in that wicker chair. A few were dressed like Verdi, polite short-sleeved cotton shirts, neatly cuffed denim shorts, pressed hair, tiny post earrings, cheeks still wet with their mothers’ kisses. Verdi found a seat on the floor next to a version of herself, they smiled at one another in recognition of their sameness.

  The current speaker was just finishing up as Verdi caused a ripple across the row as she settled into her spot on the floor, was just introducing Johnson to give the welcome to the incoming freshmen as Verdi shifted her hips to cross her legs lotus-style.

  Johnson took to the front of the room, stood there and waited for Verdi to get still, and was struck by how smooth her knees were. She looked up then, saw him looking at her, felt the entire room focused
on her. Her face pulled back in embarrassment but then he let loose a smile, nodded at her and said hello, looked up and took in the entire room. “And hello to you all.” He knocked the table three times with his fist. “All of you freshmen will hear such a sound against your door in the next days,” he said. “It will be me, or another member of my freshman orientation committee, all sophomores because we’re close enough to have not forgotten how it feels to land in a place like this, but we’ve survived a year and hope you can benefit from what we’ll pass on of our experiences.”

  He began talking in expansive sentences then and Verdi was further riveted by his voice. After she’d been captivated by the way he’d just smiled at her, by his energy, his sense of motion in his thready-cut clothes, even his tall, dense Afro seemed to sway as he did; the asymmetrical tilt to his eyes that were even darker than his skin and made him look simultaneously threatening and tantalizing, as if he were accustomed to keeping people at bay or enrapturing them with his eyes depending on his mood; after all of the visual depictions, it was aural, his voice that affected her now, the baritone of it, the citified bad-boy edge to it, the way he stretched it and filled the room with it now with his intelligent and explosive sentences.

  “The BSL isn’t just here to throw parties,” he said, “though it cannot be denied that we throw one hell of a party.” He paused for the laughter and applause, then turned serious. “There is tremendous need for the defragmentation of our voices,” he said as he went on to talk about the power black students have when there is a focused, unified approach. “The university can turn a deaf ear to ten of us, but let’s see them do it to a hundred, they’ll try, but our raised collective voices can and will drown their best attempts at not hearing us, at not responding to our requests that through the university’s own subjugation rise up as demands.”