Trading Dreams at Midnight

by Diane McKinney-Whetstone

  She stopped at the pay phone in the lobby and called the hospital’s patient information to get an update on Tish. Fair. Okay, Neena told herself, she could handle fair.

  The temperature had actually risen since she was last out and she slowed her steps to enjoy the feel of the night. The air was like a feather. She said into the air, “Be okay, Tish. Please. You and my nephew please be okay. Please, please, please.” She repeated it louder as she pushed her voice into the silvery air. “Please be okay, Tish. Please, you and that baby be okay.” Worked herself up to a full-scale incantation as she walked. Walking now past the fountain at Logan Circle; the fountain was shooting pink water into the air and she wondered who would do such a thing as turn the water pink. She thought about all those the pink walls of her childhood; remembered how Tish had grimaced at the one house on Sansom Street when they’d returned from school and Freeda greeted them, gushing, smelling of turpentine and paint thinner. Freeda had just covered the living room walls with the thickest color pink Neena had ever seen, so thick that the room felt smaller, the ceilings lower, and she remembered that she started to perspire. Then Tish began to cry. “This is ugly, I hate it. Who would do such a thing?”

  “But, Tisha,” Freeda had said, “I need it. I need the pink to be happy.” Then Freeda’s eyes went darker and Neena wanted to slap the shit out of Tish. Though now as she watched the pink sprays from the fountain interrupting the blue-gray night, she realized that the walls were hideous, really they were.

  “Be okay, Tish, please,” she continued to chant as she walked past the Four Seasons Hotel where a town car pulled up into the driveway lined with pots overflowing with nonnative plantings and emptied itself of short white women in minks. Neena called out even louder for her sister and the baby to pull through. She didn’t even care that she looked certifiable out here talking to herself as she continued to pray through the air. She invoked Tish’s name for the several more blocks as she entered the thicker part of downtown. Even as she crossed Market Street. Market Street right now still loaded down with people, all types of people that seemed as if they’d been flung from galaxies far and wide, a miracle that they didn’t start a war of the worlds out here, or at least collide like meteors smashing into each other’s heavens. She was almost shouting out Tish’s name by the time she reached Broad and Chestnut and there in hearing range was Bow Peep at the same corner where’d she’d seen him last. Now she was suddenly embarrassed as Bow Peep looked at her, his long mouth upturned in a smile. She felt like a high-brow Baptist caught dancing at a Pentecostal church as she put clamps to her mouth and shyly waved.

  Bow Peep motioned her over. She started to ignore him and continue on but she was already within the range of his gravitational force. So she stopped.

  “Whoa, the hair, I like,” he said

  She’d forgotten that she’d picked it out into a tall ’fro. “Thanks,” she said. “I’m in a hurry, sort of, and don’t really have time—”

  “Yeah, where you headed?”

  “Uh, somewhere,” she said, deciding she’d not mention that she was on the way to meet up with his buddy. “We’ll run into each other again soon, I’m sure—”

  “You know somewhere there’s a place for us, Neena, a time and place for us. Who is Tish?” he asked before she could pull away. “Isn’t that the name you were just calling out?”

  “That’s my sister.”

  “Ah, the one who might be having a miscarriage,” he said as he punctuated himself with a low note blown through his flute. “You told me, remember, the night you cried.”

  Neena nodded, of course she had. Not like he had special powers and could otherwise know. He began playing his flute again and then she did pull away, even as she felt the notes he blew pushing like a massage in the small of her back.

  She stepped into the blue-colored air of the venue for the fund-raiser. An upscale jazz club. She was bombarded by the sight of pink-leather-purse-draped women all pseudo-pretty in a Condoleezza Rice been to charm school but I’ll cut you if you fuck with my man sort of way, the men in pin-striped designer suits. She thought that if Tish were well she would fit into such a place except that her sister was really pretty, really nice. A flat-faced woman with slicked-back hair and rimless glasses sitting behind a skirted table asked Neena for her name, then told her to stand off to the side because she wasn’t on the list and someone would speak with her shortly. Neena ignored her and walked toward the main room, replied to the woman’s “Miss, uh, please,” that she was just going to use the ladies’ room for goodness sakes, an oversight anyhow that her name wasn’t on the list. Said bitch under her breath as she went into the bathroom and then commenced to sneeze from an overwrought bouquet of tiger lilies taking up the granite-topped vanity, granite the new Formica, she thought as she used the bathroom then stood at the vanity and took her time washing her hands though the lilies were making her eyes swell, her nose run. She lifted a cotton napkin from a stack folded in a gold-leafed basket and drenched it with hot water and held it to her face. Her inescapable reality mingled with the steam rising off the napkin and sifted into her pores: that she was destitute in her black on black designer clothes. She wondered how many times in the course of a day she’d encountered people who looked like her, normal-looking, well-dressed people. She’d never considered that they might be hungry, like she was right now, that they might be the end-of-the-week-away from homelessness. She got a chill at the thought. She heard someone coming into the bathroom so she dabbed her face dry and reapplied Vaseline to her lips. Her hair was standing wild and she pulled her fingers through to make it taller still, then patted the ends to shape it into a more even mound. She walked out of the bathroom and once again back into the blue air of the jazz club.

  She edged past the woman checking names and moved toward the sounds of a vibraphonist warming up in the bar on the other side of the club’s main room. Baby-stepped her way across the hardwood floor around the circles of people sipping wine and munching on political commentary. A tray of petite food floated past and she started to reach and pull away one or several, wanted to just tell the waiter to give her the entire tray so she could find a corner somewhere and stuff them two at a time into her mouth as empty as her stomach was, load her purse up with the rest to eat when she returned to her room. The tray was filled with crab meat; she could tell by the smell and she was allergic to shell fish. Another tray went by her head filled with shrimp. She wondered what was wrong with having a little cheese and crackers, some chicken wings. Hated the way some black people felt the need to overdo as she dodged the cell phones that waved through the blue air like silver minnows until she made it over to the marble bar area that was cast in a soft pink light. The sounds of the vibraphonist melted the pretense over here, the air over here creamy and quiet compared to the rest of the club. Excitement surging in the rest of the club because rumor was that Barack Obama was slated to drop in. A sparse assemblage of deal makers and men and women trying to get some physical release sat or stood in couplets around the bar and hung on to each other’s whispers. Neena settled into a leather-clad booth. She slid her coat off and ordered a ginger ale. She sipped the ginger ale slowly. Allowed the lilting sounds from the vibraphone to work through her like so many fingers, so calming this music was. She had a clear view to the circle of light where the vibraphonist played. An old head. Complexion like a copper penny. He was playing “The Shadow of Your Smile,” and Neena wondered if Cliff would even show up. Couldn’t believe that she was preparing to do this yet again. She hopscotched through her memory and thought of the other men she’d conned, landing now on that first one.

  He was a doctor, she’d met him while selling pharmaceuticals; she was in her twenties and shaking down a man had been the farthest thing from her mind. She’d actually felt something for that one. Not love exactly but a sweetening in the air when she was with him as if wind chimes were suddenly moved to sound. He was coal black with silky straight hair; told Neena over the lavish
dinner paid for by the drug company so that he would write their prescriptions that his wife married him mainly because she wanted her children to have pretty hair. His wife was obsessed with hair, he’d said, and looked as if he was about to cry.

  He was a gentleman. He didn’t press his knees against her thighs at all during dinner the way that one doc had, nor did he slip his delicate surgeon hands beneath the stark white tablecloth to cop a schoolboy’s feel as they shared a caramel-apple ice-cream dessert. And even though he did kiss her mouth good night at the dinner’s end, it was a tenuous kiss that asked permission. Neena appreciated that he was polite that way. The night lasted then for a few hours more in a hastily gotten room at a Westin Hotel. A year-long affair ensued until it was time for her to move on.

  For the occasion of breaking up she’d served him in the dining room of her one-bedroom apartment that she’d rented furnished. She loved the view that apartment had of Lake Erie that caught the fractured rainbows in the evening light. She’d prepared appetizers of smoked blue fish and crumbled feta rolled in phyllo, a spinach and orange salad, a main course of linguini under blackened tuna. She’d started off by talking about Freeda; she’d otherwise never talked about Freeda and even that night did so in metaphors. “My mother spun in and out of my sister’s and my growing-up years the way that fabric did when we used to go with my grandmother when she’d buy material for the choir robes she was always stitching. The fabrics were wound on these huge bolts, rows and rows of bolts from the ceiling to the floor in store after store along Fourth Street in South Philadelphia.”

  He looked at her quizzically as she talked, wondering, she could tell, where the story was headed. His soft face scrunched mildly as he glanced at his watch. He was supposed to be at the board meeting for Black Men Making a Difference. The meeting would go until ten so he needed to leave by nine thirty so that he could fall in on the end of the meeting and be seen there. He rubbed his hand up and down her arm. “That doesn’t give us a lot of time for, you know.” He motioned toward the bedroom, then leaned in to kiss her arm.

  She pulled her arm away. “This is important,” she said.

  He relented and dropped his delicate hands, reminding her that he had only until 9:30. She wasn’t insulted; didn’t feel exploited. She generally wanted to move against him as much as he did her. She was using him too. But at that moment she needed to say what she needed to say as she described the most spectacular bolt of all. The one wound up with hot pink silk. She stretched her arms and swept them wide. “My mother was like that pink-colored silk; she’d spread out in a grand display, just dazzling she was. But sooner or later her sadness would hit and she’d roll up into a tight button until—poof—she was gone. The thing is, though, once you’ve had that silk wrapped around you and been carried on a wild and riveting ride, you know, the love, the excitement, it’s like you never get over it, you know, you just got to have it next to your skin, you know, so you do whatever it takes to track it by the threads left behind.” She sat against the ladder-back chair exhausted after trying to describe Freeda, her attachment to Freeda, met his puzzled expression and then she sighed.

  “The point I’m trying to make,” she said, “is that when I was nineteen I withdrew from my sophomore year at Temple University and used my savings to come to Cleveland because this is where I’d heard my mother was.” She paused to swallow and catch her breath.

  “And?” he said, more than asked as he lightly drummed his slender fingers against the table. “Is she here?”

  “She was here, she’s gone now, but she was. Anyhow, I’ve been working with a private detective who located a woman who’d befriended her, and it looks like she’s in Newark.”

  “Your mother or the friend?”

  “My mother, who do you think. Would I be packing up to leave here for some anonymous friend?!”

  “You’re leaving?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to say, yeah. I’m leaving. I’m Newark-bound, you know, as soon as I can.”

  He didn’t say anything, his disappointment visible in the way that he lowered his head and concentrated on twirling the linguini around his fork. She hoped he wouldn’t cry. She had the thought that he wouldn’t be able to go on without her given his apparent hunger for her that would spill all out of his skin as soon as she opened the door and she’d rush him inside so that his hunger wouldn’t grow an ocean on the hallway carpet. She tried to keep the conversation upbeat as she told him that though the hunt for her mother was draining financially, work should be easy to come by in Newark. She ended her spiel with how glad she was that they’d never been found out. She knew how important that was to him, his marriage, his coveted position as the chairman of the Deacon Board at his church.

  He raised his head when she got to the part about his marriage, his generally soft-featured face suddenly a hardened mold of itself. His fork hung in midair, his arm paralyzed, linguini strands tic-tocking from the fork splattering the sauce against his blazingly white polo. She knew enough to know that this was not the look of someone about to sing a Chi-Lites tune of “Oh Girl” (I’ll Be in Trouble if You Left Me Now).” Knew that this was the look of someone thinking he’s being shaken down. She was smart that way in her ability to discern facial expressions. Too smart for her own good, her grandmother always said.

  He started to cough; his delicate surgeon hands covering his mouth with a salmon-colored linen napkin; his eyes darting frantically as if she’d just said, Pay up or I’ll send pictures of our naked asses to your wife, your pastor, your straight-haired kids.

  She felt a rage building that he could so readily misconstrue their year together as her orchestration of some premeditated sting. She fingered the stem of the glass holding her ice water, thought about tossing it right where his eyes bulged. She combed her fingers through her hair instead, pushed its thickness toward her face to hide her rage. She’d had her hair flat-ironed the day before at an overpriced salon because he liked it bone straight. Realized then that it was him, not his wife, who had a thing for hair. Counted up all the money she’d spent on her hair the year they’d been together. All the money she’d spent period shopping the gourmet aisles to put together meals like the one she’d fixed that evening. Her rage flapped around in her chest like a caught bird as she considered the price she’d paid for clothes that tantalized like the hot pink off-the-shoulder drape-neck top that she wore right then that fell to one side when she moved a certain way. It fell halfway down her arm because she was rocking herself to settle herself down the way she’d always done. The rocking worked so well for her that day that by the time he stopped coughing and could straighten himself up in the ladder-back chair and get his mouth to work to ask her how much? How much did she want to go away quietly? She didn’t throw her ice water in his face, didn’t shout, Asshole, I’m not trying to extort money, I’m only trying to tell you about my mother! She fixed the dark severity of her eyes on him. Calmly replied then, “Five thousand. You know, I think five thousand should do.”

  She had been surprised how quickly, how easily that first one paid. And that had been in the early nineties before the proliferation of the Internet. The Internet changed everything. Even a married man who might admit to an affair would do whatever it took to prevent himself from actually being seen so compromised in the form of streaming video e-mailed to his prestigious Listservs. Cade had been the first man to actually take a chance that she’d been bluffing. She wished she hadn’t been bluffing. Wished she had the video for real. Wished there was a way she could get into that Chicago condo. She wouldn’t allow herself to think about all of her possessions locked up there. Had to imagine it all dead.

  Neena drained her ginger ale, ate the cherry that adorned it, even chewed the cherry stem trying to pacify her stomach that was beginning to make its emptiness heard. She looked up then because she felt someone staring at her; there he was finally, Cliff. She tried not to look at his eyes, had noted even in that two-second glance the night they first met
that he had sad eyes. She looked at his chest, he was wearing a pink tie; now she looked at his mouth; a dark, pretty mouth; a strong nose; back to his eyes. Now she didn’t even guard against her hyper-empathetic predisposition and the sadness in his eyes sneaked up on her, gathered along the surface of her skin, oozed under her skin like a foamy cream, making her hold on to his gaze, smiling as she did.

  Cliff stepped into the club with an attitude. As he’d turned the corner headed here he’d had to confront a gang of white boys—neophyte lawyers he could tell by snatches of their conversation—taking up the entire sidewalk as they practiced the art of making people walk around them. To walk around them meant Cliff would step into a puddle of water in the street so he barreled right for their center. The shortest of the gang said, “Hey pal, an excuse me would have been nice.”

  “No, you not clogging the sidewalk with your snot noses would have been nice, really nice,” Cliff said as he pushed on through and continued walking.

  “Sign that dude up for anger management,” one of them said to Cliff’s back. Cliff snuffed the urge to turn back around and escalate the confrontation. He was angry. He’d just lost a case today. Tempted to blame that loss on the fact that he’d worn pink. His wife, Lynne, had told him that pink was the color for 2004 and if he were really secure he’d wear the pink shirt/tie ensemble she’d given him for their tenth anniversary. He’d worn the ensemble today, though he was old school. Resisted now relating the pink to his lost case. Enough tension between Lynne and him these days, especially with her mother, Babe, there without making Lynne responsible for his losses. He shook off thoughts of his wife, her mother, the lost case, the white gang out on the street because he needed his game face for this fund-raiser, this one to tap the region’s conservative-leaning blacks, the type who sipped sauvignon blanc at art shows and complained about the poor. Generally not Cliff’s crowd since he’d been a poor boy until he’d started practicing law. And even for a time after he’d rejected material excess because back then to struggle was noble. He’d sympathized with the Black Panthers in his youth, demonstrated and raised his clenched fist as he’d shoveled his way through the Ivy League, for what? he’d been asking himself of late, to pave the way for this newest generation of black professionals to buy tank-sized Humvees.