After

by Marita Golden

  “You always do stuff like this? I mean, track girls down?” Bunny placed her foot on the edge of her chair, hugged her knee, and stared at Carson the way she had looked at him on the night he stopped her.

  “Believe me, this is the first time I’ve done something like this. This is blowin’ my mind, but you’re a hell of a woman.”

  Bunny stared at Carson, trying to decide, he knew, if he was a deranged serial murderer who puts on a cop uniform on Saturday nights or really a dude with a serious jones for her.

  “You know my name, but I don’t know yours,” she said.

  “Carson. Carson Blake. And I owe you an apology. And you don’t owe me a thing.” He hoped this new strategy would get him off the hook and speed things up. Shading her eyes from the glare of the sun with her long, red-nailed fingers, Bunny gave Carson one last look that took in everything about him that she could see and everything she suspected and said, “I’m hungry. You wanna take me to get something to eat?”

  “Sure, this is my day off.”

  “Wait till I change my clothes.”

  Bunny came out of the house wearing a navy blue batik sleeveless dress that flowed lovingly over every curve of her body and big dark sunglasses. Her auburn hair was pulled back in a bun. Her mother looked out the window as Carson and Bunny walked away.

  “What would you have done if I wasn’t at home?” Bunny asked after she had buckled her seat belt.

  “Kept coming back until you were.”

  Bunny laughed, the sound throaty and unrestrained. She removed her sunglasses and stared at Carson again. It was as though it finally hit her what she had done and she was holding this thought in her mind, measuring it to gauge the full weight of why she was sitting in his car beside him.

  Bunny put her sunglasses back on and stared straight ahead, and Carson reached over and touched her hand. Without looking at him she entwined her fingers in his. Over lunch at Rips, surrounded by the slightly darkened rustic decor, she asked, “So you never did this before?”

  “That’s the second time you asked me that.”

  “I know.”

  “Why’d you come with me? I know even now you must be a little…”

  “No, I’m not scared,” she insisted. “Not anymore. I came because I wanted to. You don’t frighten me. I got in your car because I knew I’d be safe.”

  “That must be some feeling. It’s one I’m not familiar with.”

  “A woman can tell.”

  “A man can too.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re not the only one risking something here. Knocking on your door was harder than the hardest thing I’ve done on my job.”

  Carson sat outside Bunny’s house for a full ten minutes, wondering what he’d say. He sat in his car so long, a group of boys riding bikes in front of the house next door huddled together and began whispering and pointing at him.

  Now Bunny was sitting across from him in a booth at Rips. Listening to him. Since the night he almost gave her a ticket Carson had tried to plot out what he’d do, what he’d say, if he were lucky enough to get inside her house. Nothing about his complex, haunting desire inspired him to think that what was happening would happen so easily, so fast.

  “Did you always want to be a policeman?”

  “No, I never thought about being a cop before I became one. I joined the army after high school. It made me feel like I was part of an effort much bigger and more important than me. I was stationed in Frankfurt, Germany, did two tours, and when I got back stateside I went to Prince George’s Community College for two years, then decided to join the police force. I wanted to get that feeling back again.”

  “I’ve never been overseas, but I heard those German women love Black men,” Bunny said while reaching for a bread stick from the basket on the table, then shifted her gaze to a penetrating study of the bread stick she held between her fingers.

  “Yeah, some of them do.”

  “Did they like you?”

  “Some of them did.”

  “Did you like them?”

  “I liked quite a few. But it was never serious. I always felt they had an ulterior motive, like wanting to get to the States.”

  The women Carson had been involved with had often been older divorced women with children. Bunny’s hazel eyes, now gazing at him, were a crystal ball in which he could see the real meaning of those relationships, how he had been just marking time. Stalling. Waiting for this. Waiting for her.

  “Are you ever afraid on your job?”

  “Sure,” he told her with an easy shrug.

  “Have you ever fired your weapon?”

  “Not yet. I hope I never do. It’s not like the cop shows on TV. They make more arrests in one day than we make in a month. When they shoot someone, they’re back on the streets the next day. In real life we get put on leave that can last days, weeks, sometimes as long as a year.”

  “What do you like about it?” Bunny asked each question with no hesitation, cradling her chin in her palm. Carson felt as if he’d never been looked at or listened to until now.

  “Catching a bad guy, saving somebody’s life.

  “My first assignment was in my old neighborhood. So I knew everybody and I had to arrest some guys who’d been my friends. That’s probably the hardest thing I’ve done so far.

  “The first time you see a corpse it’s a shock. Nothing prepares you for it. All that time I was in the army I was never on a battlefield. But my first week on the force a guy got shot in a drug deal that went bad. Shot in the face. I was just out of the academy, but I had to look at the body, get over the horror I felt, and knock on doors in the neighborhood to see who knew anything, who might have seen what happened. I learned pretty quick how to stand a few feet from a corpse and talk about sports or some TV show, how to laugh at another officer’s joke, all so as not to lose it or fall apart because I’d just seen someone’s brains splattered all over a kitchen wall or heard a four-year-old girl tell me or another officer that her daddy had raped her.

  “I’ve seen my own death in my mind. I’ve imagined it. Because I’ve seen other people die, up close, in a way I couldn’t explain away. I found a sixteen-year-old girl murdered and buried in a shallow grave behind a high school. Most of the time it’s quiet, but when all hell breaks loose, my own death flips through my mind. I can’t help it. I’m not anticipating it, just acknowledging that anything, anything, could happen.”

  “Then you probably value life more than most people.”

  “I try to. I really do. Most people wouldn’t think a cop would say that. They think we’ve all seen so much that’s ugly, that’s bad, that life gets cheap. There are a few officers on the force with me now—I call them the walking dead—they’re like zombies, shell-shocked and callous. Bad apples. I never want to be that way. I’d quit before I got like that.”

  Carson decided then and there that Bunny was the most beautiful girl he’d ever met. Hers was a muted yet eccentric beauty expressed in the details of her face, wide, olive-toned, featuring her pug nose, the mole above her lip, and the gap between her two front teeth, the generosity and frequency of her smile. In the weeks following this first date, Carson would come to love just looking at Bunny, dressed in an outfit that rippled with colors that seemed Asian or African or some melding of both, her jewelry always some ancient-looking precious stone—topaz, amber, or jade—dangling earrings, made of the same natural stones, that when she laughed peeked out from the shadows of her long auburn hair. She loved rings, silver mostly, and wore one on nearly every finger. She’d turned herself into a work of art, woke up every morning and saw herself as a canvas.

  The stories she told Carson that day about herself were blessedly normal. She was a Big Sister to a fifteen-year-old girl named Chantal who wanted to be a veterinarian. Bunny had graduated a month earlier from Marymount College in Arlington, Virginia, where she studied commercial art. During the summers she landed internships with local firms and had been hired b
y a small design firm in Georgetown as a junior designer, a job she would start in a week.

  “Everything in the world is designed,” she told Carson. The firm she would join created the logos and signs for the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery at the Smithsonian. “And I mean everything, from the rooms in the gallery, to posters, the brochures, maps, napkins in the cafeteria. Carson, everything you touch, from a bar of soap to toothpaste, has been designed. Nothing in the world that we live in is random. It’s either been designed by us or by God. I’m pretty good at details, and I have a steady hand. I feel sometimes like the work I do, as much as I love it, is theoretical, mostly a concept. But I like it because it’s functional and it can be beautiful at the same time. But what you do is so real. It’s so essential,” she told him, emphasizing the word essential as her fork grazed the flesh of her salmon steak. The word felt to Carson like an unexpected kiss on his lips.

  “So you’re an artist?” he asked, famished to know everything about her. Now.

  “Well, yes and no.”

  “You have to show me some of your work,” Carson said, nudging his way into her future, into days beyond this one.

  “I will.”

  When they talked about their childhoods, Bunny told him she was an only child.

  “That’s how I always felt,” Carson said, “although I’ve got a younger brother. But it toughened me up. Made me hungry for what I grew up missing, taught me that in the end you’ve got to depend on yourself to make it.”

  “I don’t believe that,” she shot back quickly, pleading her case with eyes he was now convinced could see everything he was and hoped to be. “We need each other, Carson—pitiful and cruel as we are, we’re all we’ve got. I’ll never believe we’re supposed to go it alone.”

  Her words were like the flash of a comet, inexplicable and grand across the dark firmament of the past that Carson carried always with him and used as a weapon and a balm. That night he would dream of Bunny saying those words and wake up the next morning remembering the relief he felt at how bravely she punctured his cynicism.

  Soon they were a couple, Carson going with Bunny to backyard barbecues and picnics and clubs on the Saturday nights he had off. Until then, he had taken all the overtime he could get and put in extra hours on the weekend at a security gig at one of the malls. The women before Bunny had to take his schedule or leave it. Between the overtime and the part-time job, Carson doubled his salary and had a fat chunk saved. He was just making the money and squirreling it away. Now he knew he’d been saving that money to start a life with Bunny.

  There was no rush, because this was for keeps, he thought in those first weeks. Still, there was so much more of Bunny, so much more than he had imagined as he watched her walk toward him, coming out of the ladies’ room as he stood in line to buy popcorn at the movies, or away from him, her hips undulating in the tight jeans she sometimes wore, as she walked to her front door when Carson took her home. So much more of her than he had thought from holding her on the dance floor at Ecstasy, his hands roaming the geography of her back and her hips as he throbbed bloated and impatient against her groin, as she laughed in his ear and ran her tongue across his lips. There was so much more of her when she was finally in his bed and he suckled her heavy, bulbous breasts, the dark brown nipples tense and veined with desire. Her thighs were more muscular than he thought, and they imprisoned him as she rocked beneath him, her moans not garbled but articulate and clear, chiseling an ancient language on the walls of his room. And there was so much more of her than Carson thought as he kissed her abdomen, the mixture of sweat and perfume, the biting smell of her, blistering his tongue. She shifted her body so that Carson was staring at her pussy as her fingers played with his ears and her hands massaged his head. He didn’t hesitate to kiss her there. Bunny was thrusting and tensing with moans she muffled with her own hand.

  And after Carson made love to her and then fucked her and made love again, and their bodies were twisted and joined in an embrace Carson swore to make last forever, they talked, because what they had just done didn’t shut Carson down like when he’d just made it with the wrong girl.

  Carson asked Bunny about her mother, who still assessed him warily when he came to the house, whose approval he could not seem to win, who set him shuddering with undeserved generalized guilt the way his stepfather, Jimmy Blake, used to do. Bunny lay propped up on several pillows, clutching the sheets above her breasts. Her hair was rumpled, framing her face in a seductive, delicate architecture.

  “My mom’s got a problem. It’s called my dad. They divorced when I was ten and my father remarried. My mom won’t move on, won’t let go of him or what they went through.”

  “So when she looks at me she sees him?”

  “Sort of. I mean, she just doesn’t trust men.”

  “Tell me about it.” Carson sighed, placing his hand beneath the sheets, embedding it between Bunny’s thighs.

  “Maybe you ought to find her a boyfriend.”

  “She can never meet anybody good enough for her. And when they get serious she breaks it off.”

  “Damn, so you mean she wants to be miserable, unhappy, and alone?”

  “This is my mom we’re talking about,” Bunny said, punching him on the shoulder. “But yeah, sometimes it seems that way.”

  Carson wanted to ask Bunny what her mother had said to her about him, but he didn’t want her to confirm the disdain he saw so often in Doris’s eyes and he didn’t want her to lie.

  By the fall Carson was ready to ask Bunny to marry him. He had quit the weekend security gig to spend more time with her, easily, gratefully letting the job go. Bunny passed the ninety-day test. In ninety days, Carson was convinced, you discovered everything you needed to know about a woman. In ninety days you usually discovered why you’d stay. Or what would one day make you say good-bye.

  Still, Carson kept waiting for Bunny to tell him she couldn’t handle the demands of The Job, how much it took out of him. How little it left, some nights, for her. But she never said those words.

  A week after Thanksgiving Carson met Bunny’s father. Eddie Palmer owned a Ford dealership in Queens, New York, and was staying at a hotel one weekend while attending a dealers’ conference. When he opened the door of his suite, Eddie grabbed Bunny and hugged her, lifting her a few feet off the floor and twirling her gently in his arms. Bunny had told Carson that she talked to her father every day.

  When he released Bunny, Eddie offered Carson an energetic, nearly combative handshake. He had the practiced, slick enthusiasm of a deal maker. His hair was combed back from his face and was so black Carson wondered if it was dyed, and he imagined the man preening before the mirror, applying a coat of some heavy pomade. Eddie was dressed in khakis, a sleeveless undershirt, and suspenders and leather house shoes.

  “Come on in, you two, come on in,” he boomed. “Make yourselves at home.” The suite was cozy and Eddie had finished a room service dinner, plates and trays and metal covers stacked on top of the mahogany dinner table. Carson and Bunny sat at the table and Eddie lifted the trays and dishes and placed them on the floor outside his room. He went into the kitchenette and brought out a bottle of red wine and a couple of glasses and several beers.

  “Beer or wine?” he asked Carson.

  “Beer.”

  Bunny opened the bottle of wine and poured her glass half full. Then Eddie sat down and shoved a beer and a glass toward Carson and opened a beer for himself. Carson sipped his beer and listened quietly as Bunny and Eddie talked family, Bunny’s job, Eddie’s convention, and Doris. Bunny had his pug nose, and Carson sensed in Eddie a purposeful confidence that bathed him in a sudden, welcome warmth. He had passed that on to Bunny. He’s probably a hell of a salesman, Carson thought, watching Eddie sipping beer and eating pistachio nuts. Bunny wandered over to the sofa and turned on the television so that, Carson knew, he and Eddie could talk.

  “So you’re in law enforcement?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “
Eddie.”

  “Yes, Eddie.”

  “A law ’n’ order man,” he said with a wink, opening his fat palm and releasing a fistful of pistachio shells onto a saucer.

  “Well…”

  “Oh, don’t explain. Anybody who’s got something to protect believes in law and order. You know, I never had a run-in with the law in my life. Never once, not even a ticket. I give the boys in blue their props.”

  “It’s tough. Sometimes people see me in the uniform and just assume, well, you know…”

  “Yeah, that you’re a kick-ass. Our people got to grow up.” Eddie wiped his hands on a napkin and looked over at Bunny, now cuddled on the sofa, shoes off, laughing at a rerun of Living Single. Eddie got up and sat beside Carson in the chair Bunny had left vacant.

  “Bunny talks about you all the time. She told me how you met. Did Bunny ever tell you how I met her mother? I bumped into her as she was coming out of the telephone company after paying her monthly bill, and ended up following her for six blocks until she gave me her phone number.” He laughed and shook his head at the memory. Then, with a knowing smirk that occupied not just his face but his whole body, he asked, “What was your plan? Arrest her if she didn’t go out with you?” Eddie turned on a megawatt smile.

  “Daddy,” Bunny scolded him from the sofa.

  “Aw, he can take it. You go on and watch TV. I’m talking to your man. This is between him and me.”

  Your man. Carson liked the sound of that.

  “Honestly, I didn’t have a plan. I was just hoping she’d give me a break and maybe a chance.”

  “Looks like she did. I don’t know where you two are headed. I don’t know if you even know. Even though her mama and me been divorced a while now and I’m remarried, it’s important for you to know that I didn’t go AWOL. You know what I mean, don’t you?” Eddie looked at Carson steadily, his gaze holding its breath. “I pay my taxes, my bills, and I paid child support.”

  He was telling Carson that he was no statistic. No deadbeat dad. No trifling Black man who dropped his seed and didn’t stick around to watch it grow.