“You’re the whitest white girl I ever saw. You glow in the dark, woman.”
He lifted his sax carefully off the bed and onto the chair. Then he stretched out beside me, touching me like a blind person would read Braille. My nipples stood straight out of my flat breasts, and he kissed them. His tongue was as pink as they were and his mustache tickled. I waited for the kisses to go on down my belly into the thick white patch of bush, like Tripp used to do, which made me go wild, but he didn’t. I started to worry. Maybe I should have taken a bath when I had the chance, although it never bothered Tripp. In fact, he would call me up before a date and tell me to be sure and not bathe. He loved my “woman smell.” Guys are sure different. I wanted to get a whiff of my armpit, but it was too hard without being obvious. Aurelius kissed my mouth again and rolled on top of me, spread my legs, and slid inside. I wasn’t quite ready for that little maneuver, and it was tight, practically creaking with rust from disuse, but after a minute it got better. Just as I started to enjoy it and feel that tingle begin, the insanely delicious one that starts from a mile away and gradually gets closer until it feels like a bomb explodes, he got stiff; he moaned and then stopped cold. I couldn’t believe it. Was that it? I tried a small movement, to see if I could get the engine going again.
“Don’t move.”
I stopped and stayed motionless, and so did he. In fact, he gradually relaxed until I felt the full load of him settle.
“Aurelius?”
He was asleep, I swear.
“Aurelius.” I shook him a little. “Are you awake?”
“Mm-hmm.”
But he wasn’t.
He was dead weight on top of me. Gradually, I inched out and leaned up on my elbow, looking at him. He was so gorgeous in his sleep. His little mustache wiggled as he breathed, greedily gulping deep lung-fuls of night with every breath. It was beautiful to watch. The air had gone out of my balloon, though. I’d never had anybody go to sleep on me before. I guess playing music is more tiring than I knew. Plus, the wine bottle had already been half empty when I got there. It might have been a mistake to come over uninvited like that. I got my clothes together and tiptoed to my room. I ran a tub of hot water and did, one more time, what I had been doing all these months to relieve the tension, all by myself. I didn’t know any more about Aurelius than I had before, except that he probably wasn’t worried about me rejecting him.
33
* * *
PAINTING IN THE LOFT
Dear Cassie,
I hate to start off by saying I’m sorry I haven’t written you, but I am. After what all you’ve been through, a simple sorry just isn’t enough. I can’t imagine it and pray I never have to. You will probably have more babies, but none of them will ever replace Lalea, and the only thing I can say is that I know she is waiting for you in heaven. Father Leo thinks we are reborn again, so maybe she will come back to you as another baby. I would like to think that.
I found Lale. It’s a long story, but I have to tell you that we did a modeling job together and it is going to be in the magazines soon. I haven’t told him I know you—I just didn’t know what to say about it all and I felt like it wasn’t any of my business and I would mess it all up if I said anything. He is with the Ford modeling agency in New York, going by the name of Zack Carpenter. Their phone number is 212–555–6500. They might be able to get you his number and address. I know they could get a message to him. He is really successful in this business. The ad is going to be for a perfume called Diamonds & Ermine. You might be upset when you see it, but please remember it is just a job, like an acting job. There is nothing between us, nothing at all. That’s what these jobs are—you pretend to like somebody for the picture, then when the camera stops you sometimes don’t even remember their names.
I wish, though, that you could manage to forget about Lale and move on. He did something really bad to you, but I doubt he will ever settle down to just one woman. Too many women chase after pretty boys like him, and they are all too weak to resist the attention. You have so much to offer a man, Cassie, and I’m sure there are a lot of guys back home who have just been waiting for you and would appreciate you and love you.
I wouldn’t blame you for being mad at me and not writing again. I haven’t been a good friend to you since I left, I know, but life takes turns we never expected, and no matter what happens, you will always be a special girl to me.
Love always,
Cherry
I let out a sigh of relief. It was out of my hands now. I didn’t exactly lie to Cassie, but there was no point in telling her the whole thing, either. I figured she would just find another boyfriend and go on with her life. That’s what you do—you just go on. I also wrote a letter to Baby.
Dear Baby,
Well, that was quite a letter you wrote me last. I’ll try to call when I get the chance so you can tell me what is going on with you and Father Leo. Letters are too slow. This might all be for the best, you know. If Father Leo isn’t really that dedicated to being a priest, he should drop it and get on with something else. He can join the Episcopalians if he really wants to keep on in the church thing. They’re as close to Catholic as you can be, and they can get married. I can’t really see you as a preacher’s wife, but who knows? You might love it. You’d have to clean up your act, though, and learn how to play the piano. HA! But I’m jumping the gun. I have you guys married already, and you only had that one little episode in the haunted cellar. Which hardly counts, in my book. So don’t feel so guilty.
Speaking of episodes, I finally had one, too, last night with Aurelius. It wasn’t quite as short as yours was, but nearly. What is it with these guys? Are we so hot that they can’t control themselves? I think Tripp spoiled me. I had no idea—I thought every man would be like that! Anyhow, Aurelius is so beautiful I could just sit and look at him all night. I hate to tell you, but what they say about black men is not true. I mean, he’s certainly normal, but not huge like we heard they all are. And he’s a sweetheart in spite of not being able to last more than a minute and not doing you-know-what to me. In fact, there was hardly any foreplay at all—he didn’t even give me time to do anything to him, just zipped right in and boom. And then he fell asleep on top of me. Have you ever had anybody fall asleep on you? I thought I was going to have to stay that way all night but I managed to wiggle out. He’s a heavy guy. But he slipped a note under my door and we met this morning for breakfast at Joe Jr.’s. He was happy as a clam, acted like it was the greatest experience of his life, and is taking me to hear him play with his group tonight, at somebody’s loft down in SoHo. He’s terrific on the saxophone, so it should be fun. I’ll let you know how it goes. It has to get better. I think he was just nervous.
I wrote to Cassie, just told her that Lale’s name was Zack Carpenter, that he was with the Fords, not much else. If she wants to track him down, she can, although I think it would be a big waste of time. He is not about to go back to Arkansas for any reason. It’s awful, Baby, but I don’t want to go back, either. It would be great to see you and Mama and Daddy and all, but I can’t leave right now. The ad is coming out and the commercial will be out about the same time, so I need to be here. Suzan thinks I’ll get a lot of work out of it. Oh, Baby, it doesn’t seem real—so much has happened to me in such a short time. Gina, the head of the bookers at Suzan Hartman, said it happens that way sometimes, that a girl will go out and get a big job on her first go-see. Some girls take a long time to get work, but it seems like things are really happening fast for me. I just wish you were here to be with me. I feel so far away from you. Please give Father Leo my love. If it comes handy, tell him I think he’s doing the right thing, whatever it might be. He explained that celibacy rule to me, but I never really understood why they’ve clung to it. I think they should have changed it a long time ago.
I’ll end on a funny story. I did a hair show for the buyers at Saks Fifth Avenue last week. It was wigs, mostly, falls and hairpieces. I had to be there at five-thirty i
n the morning to get ready, because they did it before the store opened, and my hair really took a beating, all that brushing and teasing and spraying, hot curling irons to smooth it out, crimpers to put the curl back in. My head was sore. Anyhow, we finished after the store opened up, and I was standing by the elevators, staring out into space with my hand on my hip, not thinking about anything except getting a cup of coffee, when the doors opened and I went to get on. The woman standing next to me screamed bloody murder. “You moved!” she yelled. She thought I was a mannequin standing there and had come to life!
Love,
Cherry
After I dropped the letters into the mailbox, I strolled up Fifth Avenue and looked at all the window decorations. Christmas is the best time everywhere, but especially in New York. The streets are full and everyone is happy, shopping like crazy, carrying armloads of pretty packages, rushing in the cold to get presents for their loved ones. It felt so good to think I would have a real date with Aurelius that night, and I wondered what I should get him for Christmas. I looked at a display of Scottish sweaters in the window of an expensive men’s store. Maybe I’d get him a cashmere sweater. A red one. That was kind of boring, though, not really his style, and it might be too expensive for a first present. He might not get me anything and I didn’t want to embarrass him. Still, they were so beautiful, all the colors fanned out like a rainbow. I wanted one of each hue, just to put on the wall and look at. I went in and picked out a Holbein violet-gray V-neck for my daddy. He has blue eyes and would look great in it.
Right next door to the men’s store was an African shop. Aurelius wore a lot of stuff like that, woven headbands and dashikis and beads. There were some great silver-and-leather bracelets for men. I picked out one in case he got me something. If the romance wasn’t going anywhere, I’d send it to my cousin G Dub, who was living up in Canada, where he’d moved when he got his draft papers. Oh, what the heck. I’d get one for G Dub anyhow. I hadn’t seen him in over a year, and all of a sudden tears came into my eyes. I missed my family so much. We wrote all the time, but it wasn’t the same. At least I knew I was able to see everyone else, but G Dub couldn’t come back to the U.S.A. because he’d get arrested. Maybe I’d go visit him one of these days. He’d moved to Toronto from Vancouver, and that wasn’t far at all from New York.
I chose a pair of chandelier earrings with those little white shells and lime-green African beads for Mama, blue and red ones for my aunts Rubynell and Juanita, black for Baby, and I got my cousin Lucille a pair in orange, since there weren’t any pink ones. In fact, there wasn’t anything pink in the store at all. Diana Vreeland, the editor of Vogue, once said that pink was the navy-blue of India, but it sure wasn’t in Africa. Lucille loved pink, and her poor little baby, Tiffany LaDawn, who was a year and a half now, had to wear those awful frilly pig-snout-pink dresses all the time. I tried to get her cute little T-shirts and things, but Lucille would never let her wear them so it was a total waste of money. I’d get her a Betsy Wetsy doll or something. On the spur of the moment, I got a leather-and-silver necklace for Lale and a length of batik fabric for Sal that he could throw over a chair or tie around himself like a sarong. I was sure they would get me something. If they didn’t, no big deal. I’d keep it for myself. If Lale did get me something, it would be interesting to see how much he spent on it. He kept trying to find out who my boyfriend was, but I would never tell him, mostly because Aurelius wasn’t really my boyfriend. Until last night. Now he was, I guess. It was all so new, I didn’t really know what to think. But it was fun to shop in the African store, and I was glad I’d read James Baldwin and Maya Angelou. I had a lot to learn about black culture, but it all made me feel closer to Aurelius.
Bopping on down the street, I couldn’t pass up a shoe store that had the cutest granny boots in the window. I already had some nearly like them in brown, but a hunter-green pair called out to me, “Cherrrrry, get in here, girl, and buy us!” One of my favorite things was shopping for shoes, even if finding my size was hard. One of the models I did a lot of leg stuff with, Laura White, and I loved to go to the Saks shoe department and try on shoes when we had a free hour. All the salesmen were shoe fetishists, she told me. You could see their eyes light up when we walked in, and three or four of them would fight for our attention, bringing out the sexiest high heels for us to try, lovingly getting down on their knees to buckle them around our ankles, their hands sometimes shaking. Then we’d parade around, like we were on the runway, pretending to decide whether we wanted them or not, while the guys’ tongues practically hung out. We always bought something, so they had the double pleasure of making the sale while getting the thrill. The salesman who showed me the green boots insisted on personally lacing them up for me. I think it was true, about the shoe thing. Of course I had to buy them.
Loaded with packages, I walked on down to SoHo, to the loft, even though it had started to snow. The air was cold and fine and I was used to walking now. I probably did at least a couple or three miles a day on rounds, sometimes more. The walking and the stairs were good for my legs, and they were my main source of income, so I didn’t mind it. In fact, I felt stronger than I ever had before, with all the exercise. I planned to paint for a few hours and then meet Aurelius, who would be playing nearby on Prince Street. I had stretched a new canvas and was going to start a painting today. It was working out pretty well, the arrangement we had. Lale and Sal were hardly ever there, and if I had a free afternoon to paint, I had the place all to myself. There was a lot of light, plenty of space. I didn’t take up near the room Preston had, with his huge canvases and that crazy paint table with the window glass he used for a palette. Sal said he missed the smell of oil paint after Preston moved out, and I knew what he meant. It felt so good to get my hands back in paint again. Mama sent all my paints and brushes up, and like riding a bike or typing, I fell right back into it. My subject matter was changing, though, partly due to this new style of painting called photorealism. Although I didn’t project my photograph onto the canvas and copy it like the photorealists did, I always carried a little camera around with me on the streets and snapped pictures, which I was using as reference for a series of portraits of street people. I had some great ones of homeless people, Rastas selling incense, hippies smoking on doorsteps, or stoops, as they call them up here, old ladies gossiping on a bench in the park, kids with nannies on the Upper East Side, the other models behind the scenes at the shows—I had a ton to choose from. Today I was going to start a portrait of Sal, as Miss Sally, as a surprise for him. I had photographed him in a great sequined gown with red lizard high heels and a tiara, no less. We wore the same size shoe, and I gave him several pairs of high heels a client had given me on a job. As a rule, I don’t like to wear ones that are too high. It’s bad enough being five feet thirteen. I don’t want to get into Frankenstein territory.
At first, SoHo had seemed creepy. The streets were full of big trucks and garbage, most of the buildings used for manufacture of some kind. Walking down the street was like running a gauntlet, with the workmen yelling and whistling, but a lot of them had gotten used to seeing me and were pretty friendly. They didn’t mean anything by it—to them it was a compliment. At night, the neighborhood was deserted until early in the morning, when they loaded up the trucks for the day’s deliveries. Right across from the loft was a pie factory, which wafted out the smell of baking and always made me hungry. Big trucks backed up to the doors in the wee hours, guys yelling and singing and carrying on as they loaded in the pies, not caring that they’d wake anybody up. People weren’t really supposed to be living down there, since the spaces were rented out to artists just to work, but of course a lot of them did. The city inspected once in a while but it was hard to catch people. Sal slid in through the back door, so to speak, when he moved in with Preston, and when Preston moved out after going into a snit about Lale living there, they’d had to get another painter in, or move out themselves. Artists had to be accredited with the Department of Cultural Af
fairs in order to get a lease, but Sal had a friend they turned down, a twenty-two-year-old girl, even though she’d had several shows, because they said she was too young to be a “serious artist,” so instead he took me to meet with a weird guy they called a fixer. The first thing he did was show us a newspaper clipping with a list, complete with pictures, of the one hundred most evil people in New York City, and he was on it. That was supposed to make us feel better, I guess, like if evil is on your side it’s all right. Well, even if it was kind of shady, I showed him slides of my work and some programs from my painting shows, so the certificate-of-occupancy papers came through. I still didn’t really understand it, which is probably for the best. I guess in theory, the space was mine and I could make Lale and Sal move out, but they knew I would never do that. I loved my attic on Twelfth Street too much. Still, I was beginning to like SoHo a lot. I could see why Sal and Lale, even though they could afford to move, stayed.
I walked down West Broadway to OK Harris, the gallery that showed the photorealists, and stopped in to see a show by a man named Ralph Goings. Most of the paintings were of pickup trucks. I got as close as I could to them and could hardly see the brushstrokes. He was amazing. Even if I used an opaque projector I would never be able to make my stuff look that real, although, as I said, my own work leaned more toward the realists, with their crisp shadows and hot-sun-on-metal feel. I loved the idea of capturing a moment in time on canvas, like a photograph, but better. The mundane subject matter was fresh and important, too. It was the ketchup bottles and pickup trucks and diners that made up the fabric of our days, and to glorify them in a painting was to glorify the small moments of our lives. More galleries were coming to the neighborhood, or at least that was the rumor. It was convenient for the artists to have galleries in the neighborhood, not that most of them would ever have a show there, but some did, and it was inspiring to go look at other people’s work. It always made me want to run to the studio and paint.
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