Trading Dreams at Midnight

by Diane McKinney-Whetstone

  He was both gentle and ferocious as he lifted her short self onto the bed and slipped his hands under her housedress and squeezed her to him. He told her that he needed her but she was so pure and he had blotches all up and down his soul, the things he’d done, but oh did he need her. His hands were hot against her back and then he moved his hands in big sweeps and started a fire wherever he touched her. Made her cry, made her holler Mercy in ways that redefined the word. Felt herself opening in places that she didn’t even know were places. Pictured suddenly a maple tree with its startling crown in full leaf, its trunk so wide she couldn’t get her arms all the way around, its bark coarse and layered all the way through to the pith, to the core to where the sap was rising so full of itself that it needed just a tap, some pressure on insertion, then the gushing could come, thick, so sweet, shaking the forest floor with its coming, or was that the bed shaking, the cream-colored coverlet tossed high and caught on the bedpost waving like a flag signaling surrender, yielding then, giving in.

  “My, my, my,” she said as she collapsed against him and rubbed her fingers through his hair that was thin and fine. “Mercy. Mnh, mercy, mercy, me.”

  Saturday, a week to the day of his arrival, Alfred was dressed to leave. His pin-striped suit pressed to Nan’s high standards, his shirt crisply starched, a shine to his shoes. He was going to pick up his paycheck, he said, make sure he still had a job to go to come Monday given that he’d been absent for a week. Would she like barbecue ribs for dinner? he asked, fried fish? a quart of something from Chinatown. Just name whatever she had an appetite for and he’d make it appear; he swore he would.

  Just you walking your strong, fine self back through my door will satisfy what I got an appetite for, Nan said, blushing, unaccustomed as she was to talking like this. She’d talked like this at the Bainbridge Street bar when she had whiskey sours swimming through her head, though again she pushed the details of that night from her mind because she did not choose to think again about the potion she’d slipped in his drink, did not want to wonder whether the fact that he’d slurped down the contents of that vanilla extract bottle had everything to do with him being here. Told herself again that whatever he’d drunk that night had come out from both ends in his massive excretion of bodily fluids. She never believed in the power of root-working anyhow. Still the thought that she now owed the devil for delivering to her Alfred hung in her mind, swayed there like a hem coming undone on a curtain valance, the threads dropping, no longer holding the billowy bottom in place.

  Chapter 4

  HAD NATHAN, THE blanched-colored man who’d just left Nan’s house looking for Neena, known where he was going, he would have parked at the other end of the block, and in doing so would have run right into Neena.

  A sitting duck Neena was the way she was glued to the corner this morning, unable to continue up the block to Nan’s house. Needed a rock hard stomach to say, Nan, things have happened and I need a place to stay for a night or two. Her stomach was tender though. Her entire self was. This being February for her too. Missing Freeda too.

  Her real intention anyhow had been to go to Tish’s house, but Tish had moved recently to a redone Victorian somewhere in historically certified Overbrook Farms and the new address was in the condo where Neena had been living in Chicago. The unit padlocked the day before by the man who owned it. Luckily Tish’s cell phone number had not changed and Neena had been calling Tish since then. Had even tried to reach Goldie at her assisted-living facility, but was told that Goldie was part of a group sickened on a bus trip to the casinos and the group was under quarantine for the next several days. Finally yesterday evening, a live voice answered Tish’s phone. Neena was unaware that Tish’s cell phone calls had been transferred to her home phone, and that Nan was there, so Neena ended up speaking to Nan—the absolute last person she wanted to speak to. Worse still, she learned that her sister was threatening to miscarry.

  Since Goldie and Tish were it for Neena in the way of help: no girlfriends, no extended family with whom she was close enough to call; she lumbered here to ask her grandmother for help. But now she faltered. She’d only gotten this close to Nan’s house because of what the man she’d met last night had said to her about a living bridge. Neena always in the state of having just met a man. Nice men mostly, married with pretty wives and reputations to protect; the soft-type man who’d been close to his mother making it easy for Neena to fake adoration, making him quick to pay when she’d shake him down in the end. That’s how she’d supported her nomadic lifestyle as she hopscotched from city to city tracking down dead-end leads to her mother. Though the man who’d encouraged her here was atypical.

  It was last night. She’d just landed back in Philadelphia—not landed as in a plane touching down on a runway at Philly International, landed as in body and soul hitting the ground at the end of a nosedive. Eighteen hours prior she’d returned to the Chicago condo from a trip to San Francisco, an ophthalmology convention where her eye-doctor boyfriend Cade was receiving a humanitarian award for his work with seniors. Cade’s wife had decided to accompany him at the last minute and when Neena said, Not a problem, that she would just hang in Chicago and see him when he returned, he’d insisted that Neena come along, though on a different flight, a room arranged for her in a nearby hotel. The experience was disconcerting for Neena, meant that Cade was getting careless. Decided to end it with him that weekend over dinner at McCormick & Schmick’s while his wife enjoyed a ladies-night boat ride up the San Francisco Bay.

  She manufactured tears and dangled him the line that had garnered her payoffs other times: that an ex-boyfriend had gotten into her apartment and hidden a camera in her bedroom and wanted ten thousand dollars to keep the pictures of their naked selves off the Internet. Cade was eating lobster tails and his lips were glistening from the butter sauce, thin lips, and it suddenly occurred to Neena that lips that thin on a black person meant that he was stingy. Plus he was red-complexioned and her grandmother always said that red-colored Negroes were mean. She felt a thump in the pit of her stomach as she watched the butter on his lips glaze over, lips so shiny that they reflected the candlelight and it appeared as if a rainbow had spread out over his thin lips; his skin tone so red at that moment that it was as if she was watching the sun set. Knew right then that he wasn’t going to pay. Even as he nodded, and said, “Okay, ten thousand,” woodenly, his mouth moving as if it was being controlled by a puppeteer. “I’ll get you the money, Neena, okay.”

  She knew then that when she got back to Chicago she’d have to pack up what she could and head for Detroit. Though when she did return she was met in the hallway by Cade’s brother Tito, delivering to Neena a get-out-of-town-by-sundown message. Said what he ought to do to her for trying to extort money from his brother. Said he ought to make like her face was a frozen-over lake and he was an ice fisher trying to get at a silver trout. The threat scared Neena and she didn’t scare easily. That he’d been so descriptive meant to her that he’d actually visualized himself slashing through the skin on her face. And she had a nice face. Not classically beautiful but odd in a way that was hard and soft and sultry with its asymmetrical arrangement as if her features had been shaped more for artistic interest than for prettiness with the heavy severe eyes and the gushy smile, the molded cheekbones, the subtly formed nose. Shaken, she’d asked if she could just get into the apartment for a few things, personal things.

  A half laugh was Tito’s response, not unlike the heater man’s half laugh all those years ago when Neena had asked him if they could work something out in exchange for his getting the heater going. This Tito was even more of a bottom feeder, a nonaccomplished slot-machine addict who humped off of his brother’s success. Collected a nice paycheck for a couple of hours a week of shuttling Cade’s half-blind elderly patients to and from appointments. He touched Neena’s face; he had soft hands like his brother Cade had soft hands. Neena remembered suddenly stories she’d heard about her grandfather’s hands, Freeda’s father. He�
��d been a stevedore on the waterfront and all that manual labor had left his hands callused and rough as tree bark. But they were magic hands, Freeda used to tell Neena, when he pinched your cheek, or touched the center of your forehead with his thumb, or swung your hand inside of his on the way to get cherry water ice, all you felt was the softness, as if his inside goodness came out through his hands. Neena thought that this one’s hands were the antithesis of her grandfather’s. This one’s hands had the feel of his inside meanness, felt as if a steel wool pad stroked her face right now.

  The people who lived across the hall from Neena were having dinner. An older couple, refined, the husband a retired anthropology professor, the wife a botanist. Neena could hear the gentle tinkle of metal against glass coming from their apartment. Nancy Wilson singing “You’ve Changed” floated into the hallway on air weighted with the aroma of baked manicotti. Neena willed them not to look through their peephole. She’d told them that she was a student at Harold Washington College majoring in political science. Believable enough since was always taking a course albeit noncredit somewhere or another. Always with a book or two protruding from her bag. Right now her tote held A Short History of Nearly Everything that she’d been reading on the plane ride back from San Francisco. Couldn’t stand the shame of what she really was: a failed daughter who hustled married men.

  Tito’s soft, rough hands pulled at the silk scarf atop her coat. She thought she might vomit though she swallowed hard and told herself to just do what she had to do to get into the apartment and at least scoop up her jewelry, pictures of her and Tish with Freeda when Freeda was happy. She knew without having yet checked that the credit cards Cade had opened for her would be dead now, the bank accounts that he’d controlled where she’d foolishly put money that was legitimately hers; her cell phone too she was sure would be without service.

  Tito’s fingers rubbed her neck, making circles toward her throat as he drew his boxy face toward hers to kiss her. She tried to tell him that they should go inside, but the sound that came out of her was more like a screeching half cry, followed by three short gags.

  He pushed at her shoulder then. “What’s that about?” he asked, his voice ricocheting from one side of the hall to the other. “You trying to say I repulse you or some shit?”

  Before Neena could reply, the door opened to the apartment across the hall. The couple stood there side by side, she in a black velour lounging set dabbing her lips with a white cotton napkin, he in brown corduroys and a tan sweater. They looked like someone’s concerned mother and father. They were childless, Neena knew, and now she thought what excellent parents they would have made. Wished right now that they were her parents, even as she wished that the floor beneath her would give way so that she wouldn’t have to stand here so filled with shame in the path of their concern.

  She forced a smile. “Evening,” she said, then turned and started down the hall. Walked away from the contents of that apartment just like that. All those things: the gold and silver, the leather and cashmere and silk; the designer’s name stamped or etched or sewn or painted on the label or lining, the strap or flap or sole. The accumulations of a lifetime. Pathetic when she thought about it.

  She didn’t know if Tito would follow her so once she was out on the street she started to run. Ran all the way to the bus station. Found an old debit card in the back of her purse from a bank in Newark with a $183 balance. That would more than get her to Detroit. Except that when the ticket agent smiled and asked where was the pretty lady headed, and she looked at his eyebrows, eyebrows like Mr. Cook’s who used to own the store at the corner of Nan’s block, Detroit never came out of her mouth. “Philly,” she said instead. “I’m headed home to Philly.”

  She felt like such a cliché sitting on the bus, sweating in her black-on-black designer garb, her overpriced knee-high boots, her leather bag. Kept hearing the Lou Rawls song about living double in a world of trouble as she rocked herself the whole bus ride, telling herself not to cry. She rarely cried.

  It was snowing when the bus pulled into the Philadelphia station at Tenth and Filbert. About seven at night and Neena was glad for the snow. Always thought that the snow softened the city. Made Philadelphia feel charming and safe like a storybook of a town where every house had an unlocked door and a frolicking spotted pet dog.

  Bow Peep, the man who would talk Neena into going to Nan’s, thought a similar thing about a nighttime snow in Philly as he stood outside of the bus station and scanned the faces. A street corner musician, a flutist, he mostly fancied himself a prophet-type healer. Looked like a prophet right then with his long woolly hair and leather sandals like Jesus wore. Strapped on the sandals even on snowy days, which made him look half crazy. Though crazy, he would say, would be pulling on wool socks over the jungle rot that he’d picked up in Vietnam more than thirty years ago. The snow’s cold wetness was wonderful against his feet as he pushed his trained breath through his flute and competed against the wide swaths of city sounds, the car horns and road rage–type cursing and loud talking in dialects from highbrow to hip-hop. He didn’t mind that he was generally ignored out here. Understood that most prophets had low approval ratings in their own lands. And anyhow there was the occasional audience ripe for a prophet encounter who’d stop and stand in front of him. So he played against the elements. Played “Tenderly” as the oblivious people rushed past. And here she was, an audience stopping to listen. She was under forty-young, he guessed. Odd-looking in a pretty way with wild fluffy hair and features that stopped short of too prominent. He bent way back to hit a high note and tried to send her a healing vibe through the music, then pulled his flute from his mouth and asked what was her name.

  “Neena,” she said. She reached into her purse and pulled up a five-dollar bill. Broke as she was, she was still touched by how hard he was working out here so she let the money flutter down into the faded green, snow-speckled lining of his flute case.

  “Well it’s gonna be all right in a minute, Neena.”

  “Yeah?” she said. “Define minute.”

  He was about to talk about the relativity of time and circumstance but now here was Cliff in front of him, his like-a-brother homey from way back reaming him out about being out here in the snow without proper foot gear. He didn’t tell Cliff his rudeness was disrupting a transformation in the early stages. The first stage was always the stopping to listen the way this young lamb just had, meant that the receptivity was already in place. Trying to explain that to Cliff would mean an interrogation about his meds. Instead he introduced them. “Neena, please meet the finest civil rights attorney in all of Philadelphia, and the best friend the universe could ever bestow on a naked-toed musician such as me.”

  “Neena,” Cliff said, extending his hand, looking beyond Neena. His attention pulled to the other side of the street. Neena shook his hand, sizing him up the way she’d been sizing men up since the heater man in the basement. This one in a nice cashmere coat, meticulously shaved mustache, strong features though incredibly sad eyes. She looked away from his eyes, had a weakness for men with sad eyes that she guessed she’d inherited from her mother.

  She looked down at his hands. “You should have on gloves,” she said.

  “I don’t need them. I’ve got tough hands,” he answered, as he turned his attention from the other side of the street. He started to say something about tough hands meaning a tender heart but stopped himself. Too much of a line; too true for him these days given the situation between him and his wife. The situation unnamed, just an unsettled murkiness between them.

  More out of habit than the desire to know him more, Neena asked Cliff for a card. He reached beneath his coat into his breast pocket. “You haven’t been denied access because of your race or gender lately, have you?” he asked, trying to make a joke.

  “Not tonight, but the night is young,” she said as she fingered the card, and then slipped it into her purse heavy with the weight of the dead—dead cell phone, dead credit cards, dead
checkbook. She smiled at Cliff, thanked Bow Peep for the music, then hurried off.

  She was still posttraumatic from her encounter with Tito and for a second she thought that she saw him in her peripheral vision. Told herself that she was being silly as she tried to lose herself in the crush of the after-work foot traffic, looking around for a pay phone to try again to reach Tish.

  She was on Broad Street in front of the Ritz-Carlton that used to be a bank. She approached the coated Ritz-Carlton doorman, slipped under the oversized umbrella he held, and smiled her gushy smile, and when he smiled back and said, Ma’am, good evening, she went into a story of having just left her cell phone in a friend’s car. Could she please use his to make a thirty-second call. He glanced at her hand and she went down into her purse, found a single dollar bill, and pressed it in his mammoth hand, thinking with hands that large he needed to be playing football instead of opening doors for thankless people to come and go and taking her needed dollar when his minutes were probably free anyhow. She sat on the bench and held her breath and dialed Tish’s number. Hoped Tish and not her husband would answer. “Tish?” she said as soon as she heard the nonmale “hello” on the other end. The “hello,” though, hadn’t come from Tish. The “hello” was in that flat, airless tone. Nan’s tone. Had she dialed Nan’s number just now by mistake. No, she was sure she had not.