Eleven
Verdi’s chest closed at the thought of sharing a meal with Johnson after twenty years. Her breath caught at the top of her throat as she pulled open the double glass doors of the diner. She breathed through her mouth once she smelled the bacon grease that hung in the air. She wasn’t hungry; the thought of chewing and swallowing right now sent her stomach in a swirl as she looked around for Johnson and was blinded momentarily by the sun glinting right into her eyes as it bounced off the old-fashioned chrome-trimmed counter and stools. He wasn’t at the counter she was sure as she blinked down the row of on-their-way-to-work types gulping coffee and taking in mouthfuls of scrambled eggs.
“You must be here for that good-looking brother I seated in the back,” a rounded tight-jeans-wearing hostess said as she picked up a laminated menu and motioned for Verdi to follow her. “You sure kept that fine thing waiting long enough, my my, my, my, my.”
Verdi wanted to tell her to stuff her commentary where the light doesn’t hit, but figured the light probably hit everywhere with this one who was making circles in the air around her as she switched her butt from side to side. She could only imagine how she must have exaggerated that walk for Johnson. Wondered if Johnson licked his lips as he followed too closely behind her, wondered if he liked this Coca-Cola-bottle-shaped woman, wondered what kind of women he’d been with over the years. Then she caught sight of him as they neared his booth and the swirl in her stomach quickened as she focused on him sitting there, swathed in sunlight, sipping from a cup of coffee, looking so calm and self-assured. She tried to settle herself down even as she was bombarded with all the reasons why she’d refused to see him over the years beginning with her loyalty to Rowe and ending with the way he’d turned his back on her, just walked out of her life and left her while she was screaming out his name. She shouldn’t be here she told herself; should be at work with her teachers and especially her students who needed her. Johnson didn’t need her, maybe he needed someone like the woman fanning in and out in front of her, someone to lay back and spread open her floppy thighs whenever he got the urge, probably how he spent his free time in all the cities he slid in and out of. He didn’t even think enough of her right now to be sitting in an anticipatory posture maybe on the edge of his seat, or even standing, shifting back and forth unable to box in his excitement like she’d been unable to box in hers the whole cab ride over and ended up getting out of the cab a block away just so that she could walk off all the mild electric shocks passing through her stomach at the thought of seeing him. He’d probably been distracted by this waitress shaking her fat ass all in his face. She stopped herself, couldn’t believe that she had allowed her thoughts to board a runaway train like this and that on top of all the conflicting emotions she was actually experiencing a streak of jealousy trekking up her spine making her warm now, and suddenly exhausted, as if she couldn’t even hold her own weight. She never got jealous over Rowe.
They were at the last booth now, and Verdi was standing in the sunlight panning through the wall-to-wall windows and the hostess was calling Johnson “handsome” and resting her palm on his back as she told him that his breakfast mate had finally arrived.
Johnson’s cup made a dull smashing sound as he missed the saucer he set it down so quickly. He was up in a flash, taking Verdi in a hug. He squeezed her tightly against his chest and she relaxed her face against his blazer that smelled of dry-cleaning fluid and then felt a fire starting deep, deep inside of her the way it had Saturday at Kitt’s but then a shyness descended over her and she pushed him away, allowed the morning sun to pass between them. “I’m late, I know,” she said, looking down at his half-empty cup. He started helping her out of her trench coat and she was sorry now that she’d worn the viscose suit that made her look padded and ripe. Ripe for what? she thought.
“Don’t worry about being late, Verdi Mae,” he said as he hung her coat on the hook protruding from the side of the booth. “I mean I’m late too. About twenty years late—” He stopped himself then, almost wanted to apologize for saying that. Hadn’t wanted to start this encounter bombarding her with come-ons. Thought about what he could say that wouldn’t sound like a come-on; surely couldn’t compliment her on how gorgeous she looked right now, her face so open, so filled up, her entire person brimming with the essence of her womanhood as she slid into the leatherette booth that was a wispy blue color like the air in here. He knew if he told her how good she looked it would be impossible to keep the physical manifestations of his desire for her from swathing his face like the sun was now.
He was facing her in the booth now. He cleared his throat, as she told the hostess-now-waitress that she’d just start with orange juice for now. He was about to say how glad he’d been to see her Saturday. Settled on, “Thank you, Verdi, for inviting me out to breakfast.”
She blushed through her cheeks and then coughed a nervous cough and then looked away, outside into the sun-soaked parking lot. They both did now as they inhaled the bacon-scented air that had turned awkward and still. They squinted through the window as if each was trying to figure something out, as if suddenly they realized that they had twenty years’ worth of strangeness between them.
The hostess-now-waitress was back with Verdi’s juice. Said to Johnson, “You want a nice, warm head on your coffee, baby?”
Johnson smiled at her in spite of himself, said, “Uh, yes, thank you, thank you very much.” She poured the coffee and the steam rising up between them provided a momentary buffer to their awkwardness and gave them something else to focus on as Johnson waved his hand back and forth over the cup and asked Verdi what could she recommend.
“Recommend?” she asked.
“Yeah, from the menu, you’ve been here before, right?” He wished now that Kitt had arranged this meeting like she’d arranged the one Saturday. Kitt was obviously better at getting them together than they were themselves.
“Oh sure, I mean it’s standard breakfast fare, the omelettes are decent enough,” she said as she scanned the menu. “Though I’m not really in a grits-and-eggs kind of mood this morning.”
“What kind of mood are you in?” he asked, looking right at her now, at her perfectly shaped face made even more so by the cut of her hair that framed her face and pointed in right at the space where her cheekbones jutted. He wanted to suggest that they head for his leased apartment that was only five minutes from here. The sight of her mouth with its pouty fullness made him want to be nowhere else right now but in that apartment, taking his time with her forever. But he didn’t want to disrespect her by suggesting it. Already he’d noticed her button her blouse along the top. “Never mind, you don’t have to tell me what kind of mood you’re in,” he said quickly, before she could.
She caught the erection that came up in his eyes then. How well she knew that look. That effusive roundness that said that if he couldn’t have her right then he’d explode. In her beginnings with Rowe after Johnson had left Philly, left her, she’d imagine that look even while Rowe moved against her and panted out her name. “No big deal, I’ll answer,” she said, wanting to set him straight if he had any ideas. “I’m in a rushed mood because I have to be at my school by ten and it’s already—” She started to pull back the oversized stark white cuff of her blouse to get to her watch.
“It’s eight forty-five,” he said, without looking down.
“And I’m on public trans—”
“I’ve got a rental, that maroon Grand Am right out there,” he said, nodding toward the parking lot.
“And that helps me how?” she asked, a discernible irritation rising in her voice as the waitress stood over them again with her check pad in her hand.
“I mean however you want it to help you, Verdi,” he said, smiling up the waitress again, motioning her to give them a few more minutes. “I mean I can give you a ride to your school, my schedule is yours all morning, I have a lunch meeting with some black clergy at the AME Plaza, but until then, I’ll be your chauffeur, or anything
else you want me to be.” He reached for her hands and covered them with both of his. He went to mush at the feel of her hands inside of his.
She tugged to get her hands back, then looked around the diner. That’s all she’d need was for someone she knew to see her here like this, to tell Rowe that she was sitting in a sunny corner holding hands with some man over coffee and juice. She felt sorry for Rowe right now; he’d been so good to her really. She stopped herself, plucked her thoughts off that runaway train again, it wasn’t as if she were packing her bags and leaving Rowe. She hadn’t seen Johnson in twenty years; he was certainly no one to be thinking about leaving Rowe for.
Johnson yielded her hands and sat back against the booth and sighed. “I’m sorry, Verdi, if that was inappropriate,” he said. “I guess I just don’t know what the rules are with us.”
“We don’t have any rules, how can we have any rules? You’re just back after twenty years,” she said.
He held his hands up as if in surrender, not responding that he had been back in the past twenty years, several times he’d been back but she was always so fervent in her refusal to see him. And then when she did see him Saturday, albeit unplanned, she seemed as if she felt something. And now she wouldn’t even allow him to touch her hands. He squeezed himself against the seat because now the coffee was running through him and he had to go to the bathroom, also had to check his voice mail. But he was afraid to get up, afraid that when he came back she would be gone, the way she’d disappear when he’d dream about her, right before he was about to touch her a cloud of blue smoke or some other dream cliché would envelop her and he’d wake crying the way someone cries after dreaming about the dead.
The controls for the diner’s jukebox sat low on the table seventies-style and he twirled the red button absentmindedly at first, while he waited for her to study the menu as if she were reading the Bible. He sent the metal-plated tabs listing the music offerings flapping. Then he started to focus in on the titles and he couldn’t believe it when he saw it. “You Go to My Head,” the Louis Armstrong version. The same version they’d touched palms to at Kitt’s. Damn, times like this made him wonder how he could have spent so much of his life doubting a God. He slid a dollar in through the receptacle and double-punched so that the song would play twice, and now he really couldn’t hold his water anymore and the hostess-now-waitress was back, writing down Verdi’s order of English muffin and fresh fruit and then winking at him when he said that he’d have scrambled eggs and toast and she asked him if he’d like those hard or soft.
He smiled at the waitress again, more out of politeness than any affirmation of an attraction, as he stood and excused himself to Verdi, said he was going to the men’s room, and then looked at Verdi with a pleading in his eye begging her as much as one could beg absent words that she please just be there when he returned.
Verdi looked at him in his entirety for the first time as he stood and leaned in her direction. Saturday she’d seen only pieces of him, his face, then his hands, as they touched palms under Kitt’s archway, then not at all as he disappeared into Kitt’s therapy room, only feeling his presence through the other side of the door. But now she looked at him all at once and was struck by how professionally groomed he was in his neat fade of a haircut that brought out the crinkles in his hair, his navy blazer and taupe-colored pants and a tie that blended the two, mild brown complexion unhampered by creases or scars standing there commanding his space so well in the graciousness of the window light, a hint of desire still rising in his asymmetrical eyes, and a vulnerability now too. And now she was watching his back as he walked away, and the sight of his back moving quickly, an edginess about it, and she couldn’t stop herself from remembering the sight of his back when he first left Philly, left her, and she was chasing him, calling behind him, a gorilla jones racking her back and forth threatening to pitch the life out of her the way the life is pitched out of a violently shaken infant. And he’d kept walking that Saturday night, the floodlight on the side of College Hall illuminating his back as he squished new grass under his feet and sent up a cloud of dirt around him he moved so quickly. “Johnson, you motherfucker,” she’d shouted at him, “how can you leave me like this with my shit, give it to me, give me my shit, I gave you my last money for my shit.”
She tightened inside when she thought about it now. She sipped at her orange juice that was fresh-squeezed with ice chips and leaving bits of pulp between her teeth. She looked for a cord to a shade she could pull to block out some of this sun gusting in this diner in huge billows more like rough waves than plates of sunshine.
The diner had filled up quickly in the past few minutes and Verdi didn’t see another empty, shadier booth she could move to. She motioned for their hostess-now-waitress who was taking an order at a table next to their booth. “WhatcanIgetya?” she asked after she took her time sashaying to where Verdi was.
“Some drapes for this sun would be good, or another table,” Verdi replied, trying to ignore the smirk on the woman’s face.
“Sorry, girlfriend, we’re to capacity. Your man-friend asked for a booth in the back so I seated y’all here, you know what I mean?” She swiped a minuscule crumb off of the table into her cupped hand. “Only thing I can suggest if your having a reaction to the light is that there’s a bar next door, nice and black in there, probably suit your type.” This last part she said under her breath as she bounced her hips in her walk away.
Verdi didn’t know why the simpleminded comment made a lump come up in her throat as she angled herself to a slant away from the window and decided that they’d just leave when Johnson got back. Nor did she know why her memory was going so fluid on her now. She hadn’t thought about the particulars of that night for years, and even when she did think about it, she’d always freeze that scene at the point when she was calling to Johnson’s back, and then skip ahead in a fast forward to when she woke up at Rowe and Penda’s house. Even during years of weekly fifty-minute drug-therapy sessions at the Philadelphia Psychiatric Center she’d end her story with calling out to Johnson’s back and then leaping ahead to the point when she’d drifted into consciousness and there was Penda, spooning her up clear broth, encouraging her to put something warm in her stomach to help her get rid of the chills. She had to talk that part out with her therapist and with Rowe every chance she got because of the weight of the magnanimously sized guilt that threatened to crush her over how she’d betrayed Penda.
But the other part—right after Johnson kept walking and she’d staggered into College Hall—she’d kept frozen because it was simpler for her that way, cleanly preserved, because then she could hate Johnson for leaving her, and love Rowe for saving her. Black and white, no variations of gray to fuck with her.
But right now, she didn’t know why, maybe it was the sight of Johnson’s back again after all these years, maybe it was the pushy sunlight, but the fullness of the memory of that night was melting right in front of her as she ran her fingers up and down the chilly exterior of her orange-juice glass.
She saw herself, how low she’d sunk the night Johnson left. So unkempt, unwashed, uncombed, unrefined, unraised, unschooled, unchurched, so unclean. A nearly dead forest spawned weeds in her mouth from vomiting up so much foam and bile and not rinsing her mouth out afterward. And when she hadn’t been able to get Johnson to turn around with her voice, she at least knew enough not to try and chase him down, knew her diminished body surely couldn’t accomplish what her words had been unable to do. So she staggered into College Hall to get to a bathroom to piss or shit or vomit, or bang her head repeatedly against the porcelain until her brain was swimming in blood because at least that would be a relief. And as she passed out retching over the urinal, unaware, or not really caring that she had stumbled into the men’s room, she heard someone calling her name, and in her paradoxical stupor-manic state she thought it must be Johnson calling her, who else knew she was in here to be calling her. “Johnson,” she said over again and over again, “you came b
ack for me, baby, I knew you wouldn’t leave me like this.” She was twitching on the bathroom floor, folded up from stomach cramps, fading in and out as she waited for Johnson to come on in and shoot her up.
The droplets of water draining off the side of her orange-juice glass made a circle on the Formica table. She lifted the glass and put it down over and over making a series of linking circles. She could see it all with such startling clarity now: Rowe busting through the men’s-room door frantically yelling out her name, stooping down to lift her face away from the urinal, tenderly wiping away the vomit caked around her mouth with his argyle vest. He held her and rocked her and told her that she was going to be okay, he was with her, would stay with her, and she was going to be okay.
She was perspiring now and she put the orange-juice glass to her cheek to cool her face. The hard coldness of the glass shocked her face and now there was water accumulating in the corners of her eyes as the sun seemed to be coughing now and covering the booth with its stark yellow phlegm. Verdi made a visor of her hands as she sat there waiting for Johnson to get back to the table. She rewound that scene to the point when Rowe busted into the men’s room yelling, “Verdi! Verdi! Are you in here?” Over and over she replayed that scene until she could accept that night for how it really happened. It was a Saturday night after all, and though it was common campus knowledge that Rowe kept office hours on Saturday nights, she’d never ventured into any university classroom building on a Saturday night that didn’t have a party attached to it. Nor for that matter did she know any other student who did. Especially not on Relay Weekend. Yet Rowe knew to call her name as he ran down the hall to get to her. Before he opened that men’s-room door, he knew she’d be there, knew what condition she’d be in. Knew, knew, he knew. “Lord Have Mercy,” she said out loud. “Rowe already knew.”
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