Blues Dancing

by Diane McKinney-Whetstone

  So Verdi didn’t, couldn’t stay long. Just long enough to excuse herself from Rowe. “I need five minutes alone with Sage,” she said as he nodded and stood stiffly in the middle of the room trying to act as if he belonged here, as if he’d been invited. And Sage clung tightly to Verdi’s hand, whimpering, gasping after having cried so as they walked toward the kitchen. And Posie met them at the kitchen door and ushered them into the kitchen asking what had upset grandmama’s baby so. She pulled out a chair and took Sage on her lap and rocked her back and forth, the whole time looking at Verdi, talking to Verdi without benefit of words, using her eyes she let Verdi know that Johnson was just on the other side of the door, right in Kitt’s therapy room. Posie better than anyone knew what it was like to be so fibrously in love when convention suggested otherwise. So she used her eyes to tell Verdi that she understood, really and truly understood how badly she must want to go in there, but that she couldn’t, not now. And Verdi just stood there staring at the door, and then ran her finger lightly across the vanilla-colored wood as if it was his chest she was touching. She turned around then and Posie’s eyes were closed now as she rocked Sage back and forth and Sage had settled down as she stroked the ends of her grandmother’s hair and enjoyed the feel of the rise and fall of her chest.

  Posie opened her eyes as Verdi walked past and Verdi mouthed goodbye and blew her a kiss. Posie nodded, put a finger to her lips, and closed her eyes again.

  Verdi wouldn’t meet Kitt’s gaze though as she got to the dining room. She went straight to the closet and grabbed her leather jacket. “I’ll talk to you next week, cuz,” she said more to the closet than to Kitt. She wasn’t sure what she was feeling toward Kitt right now, gratitude, anger. How long had Kitt been planning this, this, shock that could have stopped her heart and killed her, that’s how unsuspecting she’d been, how unprepared, and apparently so was Johnson. Angry, she thought, yeah, she was angry at Kitt because she’d truly set her up, just disregarded her wishes when she’d insisted that she couldn’t see Johnson, just couldn’t, she was still too bitter over the sight of his back the night he left her, too weak. Suppose Rowe had bounded in there ten minutes earlier, and what was he doing showing up there anyhow? She was about to transfer her agitation from Kitt onto Rowe, but right then she crossed the archway where she and Johnson had danced with their palms; she breathed in deeply as if that helped her to honor that space. She felt her anger draining away into an infatuated confusion.

  Rowe stood at once when she entered the living room, and she cast around her goodbyes to the gathered, a college hoop game on the television had their attention now and even the children, exhausted from the outbursts precipitated by Sage, sat mostly uninvolved at their parents’ feet. Rowe looked blandly around the room and waved to one or two people symbolically. “Have a good evening,” he said, then opened the door onto the enclosed porch so that they could leave.

  The air had changed outside, the sun had closed its lids for the day and left the night to take over with its clear-eyed perfect vision. The earlier wind yielded to a chilly calm that was so intense it was startling. Verdi shivered as she looked up at the sky and tried to pick out the Big Dipper from the more than usual constellations offered up tonight as Rowe rushed to open the car door for her.

  He stood in front of the door then and blocked her path, took her face in his hands and mashed his lips against hers. He lingered over the kiss and then pulled her in a close hug, confusing her.

  “I’d better let you in before you catch a draft,” he said, moving aside and helping her into the car.

  He got into the car and just sat with his hands on the steering wheel. “I hope you don’t think I was out of line coming over here like that,” he said, staring at the wheel as if he were seeing it for the first time.

  “I was just shocked,” Verdi said. “That’s why I reacted the way I did, you know jumped up when I realized that was you leaning over me and then that just got Sage all riled up again.” She tried to sound as if she had nothing to explain about her behavior, but she explained it nonetheless. “I mean, I know how you feel about Kitt, that’s why I got ready to leave as soon as you came in but I needed to spend some time with Sage, it’s not good for her to stay in an agitated state. And as it was I hadn’t even been there for very long, I mean I couldn’t even tell you all the people who were there.” She stopped. Looked right at him, at his profile that looked so studious and little boyish to her now as he sat there and stared at the steering wheel as if the wheel held the answer to some deep, complicated problem. “Why did you come, Rowe? What was that all about?”

  The inside of the car was quiet save the keys tinkling as they hung from the ignition. He leaned back against the headrest. “I don’t know what made me come, really, Verdi. I was asking myself that all the way up here. I just started thinking after you left how maybe I have been overly harsh and unfair in my treatment of your, you know, her.”

  “Kitt. You mean Kitt, right?”

  “Yes.” He breathed in deeply, audibly. “Kitt, your cousin, Kitt. Though I must say she doesn’t take the prize on friendliness. She barely let me in, and only did after a barrage of questions about my motives. She even asked me if I was there trying to start something since she knows how I feel about her. And what got me is that I didn’t challenge her, you know I was very, very polite. So no, I’m not sure, really, why I came, except that I hate it when you leave the house upset with me like you did today, and quite frankly I was worried about you trying to get home by yourself on public transportation. Look how dark it is around here.”

  “I would have, could have gotten home, Rowe,” she said quietly. “I’ve been coming up here for twenty years and I’ve always gotten home.”

  He turned toward her then. His knee hit the keys and they jingled with a clarity and a rhythm that sounded like a musical instrument warming up. “And you’ll keep coming home, won’t you? Promise me you’ll always come home.” And even in the unlit car she could see the longing on his face, as if she were very, very sick and he was begging her not to die, as if he knew, but what could he know, she didn’t even know.

  “Rowe, what is it? What’s wrong with you?” she asked, wanting to stretch across the armrest and burrow his head in her chest and take away the pleading in his face, or wanting to confess, the way she always ended up confessing to him from the time when she’d confessed to being strung out. But what would she confess now, that she’d just been shocked by the reappearance of her long-ago lover, that she’d been ambushed by the onslaught of twenty years’ worth of feeling that had continued to percolate in all that time? That she would see him again, had to, even if just once to tell him that she couldn’t see him again? How could she confess that? Better that she was dying. She folded her arms across her chest. She couldn’t let herself soften toward Rowe right now, too risky, at least not until she had a chance to be with her thoughts. “Well, if you aren’t going to tell me what’s got you acting like this,” she huffed, “can you at least get some heat going? It’s freezing in here.”

  “Get some heat going?” he said, mild sarcasm running through his voice, angry at himself now for groveling like this, and at her for evoking this feeling in him that he was losing a grip on her hand, that her hand was sliding from his and she would fall if that happened. “For you? Anything for you,” he went on, the sarcasm building in his voice like a train working up to its best speed. “It’s all for you. Everything I do is for you. And you ask for so little too. Just get some heat going is all you want.” He started the car and flicked the heat to high and a gush of cold air smacked her in the face.

  She turned the vent away from her and raised her jacket collar up around her face and felt as if she wanted to cry. They turned off of Kitt’s block and she looked out the window at the pockmarked block they cruised through now where the well-kept, freshly painted house struggled to keep its dignity next to an abandoned boarded-up shell. She started to comment to get a conversation going, but she really d
idn’t want to hear his overly assured rhetoric about this neighborhood’s decline being the fault of the people who live here. But on the other hand she didn’t want to just sit in here and think about Johnson and try to process it all either. He might be able to hear her thoughts quiet as it was in here. And he was already picking up something. He was even driving faster than usual, so fast until he had to brake abruptly at the stop signs and red lights. Johnson had told her once that they purposely don’t synchronize the traffic lights in poor black communities just to add to the frustration of the people so that the people are always stopping and waiting. Now she felt the jerkiness of the stop-and-go in her stomach and now too the reality of it all hit her like the blast of cold air just had and she put her hand to her mouth so that she wouldn’t gasp out loud. “Um, Rowe, I’m feeling like I might be sick on my stomach,” she said. “Could you slow down a little.”

  “Do I need to pull over?” he asked.

  “No, it’s just the jerking back and forth.”

  “I’ll slow down then,” he said, resignedly. “Simple request, simple action. Though I guess this means you aren’t up for dinner, probably had too much unhealthy eating on your plate at your cousin’s, maybe that’s what’s got your stomach upset.” The sarcasm in his voice was yielding to concern.

  “Actually I didn’t have a chance to eat. The food had just been put out when you got there, we were just in the process of helping the children to eat when you got there.”

  “So then you are up for dinner?” he asked, a lifting to his voice.

  “Sure, I mean, you’ve got to eat anyhow, sure,” she said.

  “Where do you want to go, want to go down to Penn’s Landing, or what? Do you feel like some music? What do you feel like?”

  “I don’t know, whatever,” she said, wanting really to just go home, just take a shower and plead a headache and curl up and pretend to fall asleep to the hum of the television while she really relived the evening, the way they’d touched palms, and Johnson, the way he just walked away to spare her, all of them, a scene. But she would go out to dinner with him, she would try to be pleasant, she told herself, not gushing, not over-the-top, but personable enough while she worked to submerge the guilt that was starting to flow a little higher than the rest of her crowded consortium of feelings. She would be nice. She owed him that much, she thought as he crept along now so that she barely felt the motion of the stop-and-go.

  Verdi didn’t know that Johnson was in trouble the fall of her junior year. Thought his weight had fallen off over the summer because his mother had moved to San Diego to try to lift her spirits with her other son. Thought he was moody because of the stress of working that UPS job and still trying to maintain otherwise. She wouldn’t have known a track mark if he’d put a flashlight to his arm and traced it with his fingers, and as dark as he was it would have taken that. So she didn’t have an inkling that he was up to a bag a week, sometimes more than that depending on whether he could shake the desire when it came down on him. And even when the fact of the matter was being shouted right over her head she still didn’t know.

  She and Johnson and Tower and Cheryl were playing pinocle this Saturday night, partners, she and Johnson against Tower and Cheryl. It was October and the air had already adopted a wintery bite but Johnson had the windows open in his low-rise dorm. And Tower got up and closed the window. And Johnson accused him of stalling on taking the bid. And Tower just sucked the air in through his teeth and passed. And Verdi passed and so did Cheryl and the weight was left on Johnson. So he named his trump and got back up and opened the window while everybody put down their meld, and Cheryl said, “Come on, Johnson, what’s up with you and this infusion of cold air, you trying to give Verdi signals on what you got in your hand?”

  Johnson pinched his nose as he sat back down to the game, said, “No, it’s just hot as hell in here.”

  Tower looked at Johnson then, at his half-closed eyes and the perspiration outlining his forehead, his droopy mouth; he slapped his hand on the table, said, “I can’t do this shit no more, either you got to move or I got to fucking move ’cause I can’t do it.”

  And Cheryl studied her hand, rearranged her cards, braced herself. And at first Verdi thought Tower was just playing around, talking trash as he was inclined to do especially during a card game.

  But then Tower stood, kicked his chair against the wall, said, “Which one of us is it gonna be, man? Huh, ’cause you fucking around.”

  And now Verdi saw that Tower wasn’t playing and said, “Tower, what’s your problem?”

  And Cheryl stood now, grabbed Verdi’s arm. “Verdi, I think we should go, this a roommate thing and I don’t think we need to be here.”

  Johnson just stared at the cards fanned out in his hand. Laughed a slow throaty laugh. “Go ahead, baby, Verdi, go back to the high-rise, I’ll be there soon.”

  Tower was banging the table in front of Johnson. “After all your rousing speeches about not letting them fuck with your mind, not letting them give you a diminished view of yourself, not falling prey to their diabolical tactics, look at you, look at you, you had the motherfucking world in your hand and look at you, man. I hate you for doing this to yourself, man. Why’d you let ’em do it to you, man?”

  “Tower, what are you talking about? What is wrong with you?” Verdi’s voice screeched as she ran to where Tower was, to put herself between Tower and Johnson.

  “Move, Verdi, this has nothing to do with you,” Tower said as he put his hand around her arm, pushed her out of the way.

  Johnson jumped up then. “I know you didn’t just put your motherfucking hands on my lady,” he said, stabbing his finger in Tower’s chest.

  Verdi was jumping up and down, yelling at them to stop, and Cheryl opened the door wide, pulled Verdi through the door, telling her come on, come on, this is between them, come on.

  And when the door slammed shut sealing just Tower and Johnson in the small living room of that low-rise dorm, the chilling air wrapping them like a cyclone, Johnson dropped his hands to his sides and Tower started to cry. He grabbed Johnson by the chest of his sweatshirt. “Come on, man, fight, hit me, hit me, you motherfucker, aren’t you the one always quoting ‘Invictus,’ dying, but fighting back, where’s your motherfucking fight? Where’s your fight, man? You let them rob you of your fight. Why you do that shit, why you let yourself get strung out, you junkie motherfucker, I hate you, man. I hate you.”

  Verdi was stretched out on her bed, Charity sitting cross-legged in the corner of the room, when Johnson got there. Verdi had just described the scene, Johnson and Tower about to go at it, best friends, like brothers. And Charity said, “You’re so sweet and naive. I just love your spirit, don’t you see it, you haven’t seen it, it’s the girl that’s come between those friends.”

  “Girl? What are you talking about, Charity? What girl? Who?”

  “Not a who, my confused friend,” Charity said as she uncrossed her legs at the sound of a knock on the door. “Though I have known men to worship her.”

  And Verdi was about to ask her what she meant, but decided instead to answer the door because Charity could sometimes go on for an hour explaining something that Verdi would conclude was nonsense, and she assumed that would happen now, so she let Johnson in, and Charity said she was going to spend the night in the roof-top lounge with some of her friends, they were going to trip and hope for high winds so that they could feel the room shake.

  Verdi looked at Johnson then, at his half-closed eyes and his face that was shallowing right in front of her and his stature even crooked and leaned over and she helped him through the door and asked him what was it, what? And what was happening between he and Tower? And had he taken some kind of downer pills as slow as he was moving. What? What? What was wrong?

  And he told her that he just felt sick, that he just wanted to crash, could she please help him get to bed so that he could crash? He was whimpering and she undressed him down to his skin as if he were a six-foot i
nfant and spoke soothing phrases and gave him a sponge bath because he looked so dusty to her, then she squeezed into the bed with him and couldn’t understand why, but a brick came up in her chest and she started to cry.

  Johnson woke the next morning mildly restored. He still felt dopey under his skull but at least his synapses were firing and returning a semblance of rationality to his thought. But now the feel of Verdi’s naked body wrapped around his was both soothing and devastating. Soothing because her nearness was always a transcendent experience for him; devastating because of what Tower had said to him, about him losing his fight, giving up, becoming a junkie. A junkie. And now he was afraid that what he’d become had leaked from the inside and was now staining his exterior the way a leaky pen drips indigo blue clear through from the pocket in the lining to the beige breast front of a new linen suit. He rushed to cover the stain, to hide it under a handkerchief when he realized that Verdi was awake now; he smiled.

  Her drowsy eyes came to focus on his face and made him feel warm and comforted in a delusional way, as if everything was the way it had begun with them, so honest and clean and unspoiled.

  They were nestled under the blue-and-white covers and Verdi whispered, “Church?” And Johnson tightened, was afraid that the pillars might come crashing down if he had the nerve to step his lying, sinful, drug-addicted ass into a church right now.

  “Why don’t we, you know, lay low this morning, baby?” he said into her mouth as they faced each other wrapped up like a turban knot.