by Marion Winik
As we lingered, he asked if I’d ever dated a black guy. I told him about Brent, a tall, beautiful boy from Southern California I knew in New York in the early ’80s. I didn’t ask him if he’d dated white women. That would have been silly.
We had a warm but not messy kiss in the lobby of the parking garage (which, by the way, cost thirteen bucks an hour). I was winging those bills out the window as fast as I could, eager to get home and start Googling.
It wasn’t easy, but LexisNexis finally got me to an old article in the Baltimore Sun. J.J. had been the leader of one of two groups of investors competing to take over a hotel project for the city—until his opponents leaked to the press that he was a convicted felon who had done time for attempted murder.
Some might have seen this as a discouraging development. I, however, was fascinated. I had to at least get the whole story.
The following Monday, J.J. stopped by my house after work in his vintage red Corvette, electrifying my neighborhood. I was cooking dinner for Ken’s elderly parents and felt awkward asking him to join us. They would have assumed he was a new boyfriend—I’d never even had them over before—but inwardly I wondered whether it was because he was black. Would I be inviting him to stay if he were white? Was he wondering this, too?
“Oh, honey, you don’t have to invite me to dinner. I don’t even eat dinner. I’ll just sit at the counter, and watch you cook for a while,” he reassured me.
He certainly watched me. Watched every move. I felt like I was doing something much sexier than cleaning shrimp, as if my curves were highlighted like key passages in a text.
“You look like you know what you’re doing in the kitchen,” he commented.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said again awkwardly. “This is so rude.”
“Honey, I keep trying to tell you—I’m perfectly happy. Stop being so nervous. I adore you. Don’t you adore me?” he asked.
I couldn’t help laughing. “J.J., white people don’t say ‘I adore you’ in situations like this. But theoretically, I adore you, too.”
“Okay, then what are you doing Friday night?” he asked. “I think I have some free time then.”
By now I’d waited long enough to get to the subject that was really on my mind. I confessed my to Internet snooping, and he sighed, then told me this story.
Back in his twenties, J.J. had owned a nightclub in D.C. with a partner. The partner had a girlfriend who was married to an abusive asshole, and they’d asked J.J. to do something about this dude for them. J.J. said Hell, no. They offered money. He told them it was a bad idea.
Not long after that, the partner called and asked J.J. to meet him at the mall. When J.J. had pulled into the parking lot, it was full of police cars. As they cuffed him, he learned there had been an unsuccessful attempt on the life of the man he’d been asked to kill. The wife was the initial suspect, but now he was under suspicion as well.
At the time of this unpleasant trip to the mall, J.J. was packing heat—necessary, he explained, because he was constantly carrying cash from the club. That didn’t help his case. Nor did a phone call the wife had recorded in which they had discussed the idea. Long story short, he was convicted on circumstantial evidence, and both of them did time. “All-white jury in D.C.,” he said. “What do you expect?”
Fortunately, he served five years of a thirty-five-year sentence and was paroled at age thirty. Having made the most of his time behind bars, he left the pen with a degree in business administration and a second wife (his first flew the coop after he got locked up, so he married the woman who taught college classes in the jail).
I was filled with outrage and sympathy and disbelief, but not the kind of disbelief where you actually don’t believe. I did believe.
Friday night came. But before that, just a half-day before that, came my period. Tsunami style. I was in despair. How was I going to have sex for the first time in so long while I was hemorrhaging? Plus, considering I had already told him I have hepatitis C (part of the I-didn’t-get-AIDS speech), there were not just aesthetic but health issues. Oh, Jesus Christ. Maybe I should just cancel the whole date.
But I’d already taken Jane up to her dad’s in Pennsylvania. I’d put on my black pants and dark blue satin top with sparkly buttons. I’d lined my eyes and glossed my lips, and then I’d taken a little detour. I was standing in front of the refrigerator eating leftover collard greens with my fingers. I make great collards. I wondered dreamily whether I should bring him a sample. Oh right, a Tupperware bowl of collard greens and maybe some Jheri-curl cream, too.
J.J. lived in a part of town I had not visited before. Once an elite neighborhood, it had then descended most of the way into hood-dom. Now it was on its way back up again. J.J.’s place was as close to a mansion as a row house could be, with arched windows and pillars and curved balconies. It was surrounded by a wrought-iron fence draped in chains and titanium locks. Letting me in was a complex procedure.
Inside was a world of wonders.
There was room after room with walls painted in dark jewel tones and windows cloaked in thick velvet curtains. Each room contained a certain type of item, displayed on shelves and pedestals and in backlit glass cases. The first was Buddhas: golden, wooden, jade, stone, each with its hands in the classic mudra, its face wearing a meditative smile. Next was hourglasses. Some were tiny. Some were waist-high. Some were Victorian, others seemingly Egyptian.
After that, we came into a sort of living room, or at least the first room with couches and chairs. It featured models of clipper ships and framed oil paintings hung almost edge to edge.
Could a straight man really live here? A straight, single, black ex-con? It seemed more like some obscure museum in an outlying arrondissement of Paris than a home. But wait, there was more: Out back, in addition to the Vette I’d already seen, there was a vintage Bentley, a huge, brand-new SUV, and a gleaming Harley-Davidson the size of a twin bed in its own heavily secured trailer. Finally we went through an enormous basement filled with pallets of rugs, furniture, paintings, and God knows what else.
J.J. explained that after he’d gotten out of jail, he had a little trouble landing a job, so he’d entered various fields of self-employment, antiques dealer and real estate agent among them.
Perhaps there had been others.
After a series of winding staircases through media rooms and guest quarters, we arrived at the level of the royal boudoir. The bed was covered in lustrous brocade and meticulously arranged satin throw pillows. One wall of the room was made entirely of stained-glass windows. Another was a plasma television. And from the midnight-blue ceiling were suspended a half-dozen life-size golden mermaid statues.
I had to tell him I had my period. I really did. But first, maybe I should have a drink. He made me a pink concoction in a black martini glass in his marble kitchenette while I sat at his computer, trying to get us a dinner reservation and staring down my own cleavage, which waited patiently between dark blue satin lapels. I launched into a short, nervous speech about my period and how I’d almost canceled our date. He told me not to worry about it. “Let’s just go to dinner, darlin’,” he said.
Out in the vehicle storage yard, I went to climb into the SUV. Here we ran into a little problem. There was one thing J.J. insisted on, he said. I was absolutely forbidden to open my own car door. Every single time I got into or—much more annoying—out of a car with him, I had to wait until he came and opened the door for me. “What if,” he said, “you go hopping out of the car onto the sidewalk and somebody snatches you up before I even get there?”
“What the hell are you talking about?” I said. We had definitely grown up in different neighborhoods. But I had to let it go or we were never going to get to dinner. So I did. For the moment.
At dinner, I realized that I was noticing the race of each of the people that served us—most of them were black men—
and wondering what each made of us as a couple. Did they think J.J. was cool for being with me? Did they think I was cool for being with him? Could I have been having any less cool thoughts than this? At some point J.J. told me that the people he worked with were cheap Jews, and in my uncoolness this actually made me feel better.
By the time we returned to his house I was drunk, which made me more relaxed about the whole megillah with getting in and out of the car, and before I knew it I was up there with the flying mermaids. It was my first time in so long, and I wanted it to be special and perfect. I wanted it to erase my ex-husband and the Doucher and all my self-doubt, but more likely it was just going to be an unsexy mess.
My date, bless his heart, seemed to feel that with enough bath towels and condoms we could negotiate the sidewalk sale on body fluids.
His handling of the situation was nothing if not gallant. He murmured compliments about my soft skin and my nice stomach; he didn’t even mention the damn tattoo of my husband’s initials, and though this was probably an abbreviated version of his usual lady-pleasing routine, it was still nice. It did feel strange to be with someone other than my husband, but I tried not to dwell on it.
However, as the action continued, I was having a tough time interpreting exactly what phase of arousal he was in. He kept his eyes closed mostly, and when it was over, I was unsure whether he’d had an orgasm. Was I just out of practice? Should I do something about this? Apparently not, since he was already cleaning up the towels.
Later, lying sleepless and distraught beneath the flying mermaids, I wondered if perhaps he took Viagra, and that’s what made it seem sort of odd. At fifty-five, J.J. was the oldest guy I’d ever slept with; maybe it was different with this age group. I’d have to ask Ken, I decided.
I looked over at him, now seemingly fast asleep, and started worrying about my usual bed partner, my beloved miniature dachshund. What could he possibly be thinking, now that it was three-thirty in the morning and I hadn’t come home? I pictured him staring at the front door, his head tilted to the side. I would have left but I knew I couldn’t get through the security system on my own.
At 5:00 a.m., I ventured a delicate toss-and-turn maneuver. “You all right, baby?” he asked. When I explained that I had to go home to my dog, he put on a pair of pajama pants and padded downstairs to undo all the bolts and padlocks and let me out. We had a muted, predawn farewell. He did not insist on following me to the car to open the door.
Both of the next two weekends he told me he might be able to see me. Both times, I assumed this meant he would see me. But never did he take my calls or answer my texts on a weekend night. I expressed my irritation about this in carefully worded e-mails and phone calls. He said he would try to do better.
I said something about what I expect from a boyfriend.
“Am I going to be your boyfriend?” he wondered, genuinely surprised.
“Well, I don’t know,” I said. “I kind of thought so, I guess.”
The second Saturday night I sat with a girlfriend at a bar not far from his house, at first expecting he’d be joining us any minute; later, sending plaintive, drunken text messages. I was beginning to grasp, though he never explicitly said this, that I might not be his only girl. I might, for example, be a replacement trying out for the recently vacated number-seven spot.
We had sex one other time, sort of like makeup sex, though we hadn’t exactly had a fight, at my house at lunchtime on a weekday. As we headed upstairs, I realized this would be the first time I’d been with a man in my postmarital bedroom, the incident with Humberto notwithstanding. J.J. admired the clerestory windows, the framed photographs, my mother’s collection of Herend china animals arranged on the dresser. I flipped the little blue dog to show him its clever gold penis. Then he asked me for some hangers, and spent about five minutes removing the many layers and accessories involved in his fancy work costume, carefully hanging each of them in the closet.
Having thrown my jeans and T-shirt on the floor in a matter of seconds, I lay on the bed in my black underwear, watching.
The sex situation was as mystifying as the first time. There seemed to be no dramatic arc of any sort—no rising action, no suspense, no climax, no denouement. It seemed it could go on forever, really. This was not necessarily a good thing. And Ken said not to bring up Viagra.
The next weekend was Thanksgiving, my first big holiday in Baltimore. J.J. had plans that he never really clarified, but he called me on the holiday from a place where he was getting his car windshield fixed. I wondered if he’d been shot at. In between yelling instructions to the repair guy, he said he’d like to stop by before he left town.
“Well,” I said, “my sons are home from college. Would you like to meet them?”
“Sure,” he said, which I didn’t expect. I hung up the phone and turned to my sons, side by side on the couch, watching the Dallas Cowboys game.
“Boys,” I announced casually, “this guy I’m seeing is going to stop in before we go out to dinner.”
“You’re seeing someone?” asked Hayes.
“Yeah, dude, she’s seeing some black guy; didn’t she tell you?” his younger brother Vince replied.
“And he’s coming over? Is it, like, serious?” Hayes asked.
“Oh, I don’t think so, honey.”
I was sitting at my desk in the front room when J.J. pulled up to the curb.
“Guys,” I called. “My friend is here.” One of the highlights of the whole relationship for me was the looks on my sons’ faces when they saw J.J. get out of the Bentley. He was wearing a black leather Stetson hat, black tailored shirt and pants, softly gleaming black boots. He was blinged to the gills and really, the theme song from Shaft might as well have been playing in the background as he crossed the street.
“Holy shit, Mom,” Hayes said.
A week or so later, I had planned a dinner date with J.J. and my D.C. friends, Jim and Jessica and Judy and Lou. I was feeling unsure about the plan, but not unsure enough to cancel. Perhaps the timing was off for the friend introductions. Then things got called off at the very last minute when Lou had emergency heart surgery.
When I called J.J. to bring him up to speed on these developments, he didn’t seem to want to settle on an alternate plan. “You probably need to go down to D.C. and be with your friends,” he said.
I hadn’t even thought of that. “Not today, anyway.”
“Well, maybe we can make this work some other time, then.” As usual there was all kinds of noise in the background and it was hard to communicate. “I can’t really talk right now,” he said, “and you don’t seem to be reading between the lines. I’ll call you later.”
“Okay,” I said, hanging up slowly and staring at the words call ended on the screen. Read between what lines? Didn’t we have a date? I didn’t understand.
I decided to take his advice and drive to D.C., where I found my friends not only no longer in the hospital but heading to a French bistro for dinner so the heart-surgery patient could recount his story with the proper accompaniment of butter and alcohol. As I gazed out at the snowflakes drifting slowly down onto the sidewalks of our nation’s capital, basking in the glow of good wine and old friends, a text from J.J. popped up on my phone. I will call to reschedule.
But that was the last I heard of J. Joshua Johnson, my knight in shining bling, or he of me. One way or another, our three weeks were up.
dear answer lady
1. freaking thanksgiving
One of my day jobs during this happy-go-lucky dating period was writing a monthly advice column for a national women’s magazine. Obviously, I had a voluminous store of past mistakes I could draw on for instructional purposes. Furthermore, my position as a national moral resource was helping to bolster my growing determination not to run around town acting like an alcoholic, manic-depressive slut. An advice col
umnist needs to keep up appearances. Particularly, say, during the holidays, though I was well aware that they are the hardest time of year to pretend one is coping at all.
Let’s take another look at that first Baltimore Thanksgiving of mine. Unsurprisingly, I had felt a little puny about it: I was an orphan, I was single, my thing with J.J. was pretty dubious, and I’d agreed to let Crispin take Jane to his mother’s for Thanksgiving dinner. Hayes and Vince would be home, but given their terrifying and indiscriminate hunger, their passion for Chick-fil-A, Chipotle, and cheese steaks, my usual frenzy of gourmet preparations looked like a bad bet. How would I prove that I was a good mother and a decent human being?
Once, I had firmly believed these things were measured in ergs. The amount you loved your family could be rated week by week, or day by day, a kind of Standard & Poor’s index of parenting value.
Number of family members (miles driven + missing items located)2
Total hours spent in kitchen and laundry room
By the time poor Jane was born, I had let things slip a bit. I was less inclined to volunteer as a chaperone for school field trips, to enforce household rules that entailed climbing a flight of stairs, or God forbid, to throw a Frisbee.
And now, freaking Thanksgiving. Was there some way out of cooking for three days and cleaning up for another two, with a twenty-minute break between for the ravening stampede? Or should I hide my tears in my dead mother’s favorite creamed pearl onions and carry on bravely? Tell me, Answer Lady, what to do.
Signed, Burnt Out in Baltimore.
Dear Burnt,
While there is an argument for the comfort of ritual in the face of chaos and crisis, this argument is usually made by those not responsible for producing these rituals. Often, the bereaved, the abandoned, the ill, and the otherwise beleaguered are tired. Very tired. Too tired to spell the word ritual, much less enact one. Also, you’d be amazed at how strongly you feel people’s absence when their actual chairs are empty. But there is good news. They serve Thanksgiving dinner in restaurants. Get on the Internet and make a reservation, for God’s sake.