This sinking feeling must be what it"s like to drown, Celeste thought. Like you’re in a whirlpool, getting sucked down, and there’s nothing you can grab onto; nothing you can do but die.
After a miserable lifetime, the movie ended and the lights came up. That"s when Celeste"s night took a turn for the worse.
Frank stood, stretched, turned and then saw her. “Hey, Larry and Celeste—you made it! You find something to eat?”
Celeste didn"t hear Larry"s reply. The dark-skinned ho on the couch turned, recognized Celeste, grinned and waved.
“Hey baby sister!” Nikita greeted her.
18 Celeste should have received an Oscar for how well she concealed her true feelings that night.
In between the movies, Frank came over for some polite social mixing. “How much of the movie did you miss?”
“Only the first fifteen minutes or so,” Larry said. “Celeste has seen it before, anyway.”
“Me too,” Frank said. “This makes three times, for me.”
Larry raised his eyebrows. “I never understood why white folks do that. Once I"ve seen a movie, it"s been seen, already.”
“Hmm,” Frank said.
“I put the lettuce on the counter,” Celeste said. “And I put the salad in your fridge.”
“Salad?” Frank asked.
“Well, I had more lettuce than you could put on a truckload of burgers,” Celeste replied, laughing breezily. “Didn"t want it to go to waste.”
Frank shrugged and smiled. “Somebody might get the munchies later. About now is when those who are inclined to do so start heavily intoxicating themselves.”
Nikita floated up and latched onto Frank"s midsection, grinning broadly at Celeste. “What"s up, Lil" Sis? Who"s your date?”
“Nikita, this is Larry. Larry; Nikita.”
“Guess you finally got over Coach, then, huh?” Nikita asked. “Good for you.” Then she winked at Larry. “Maybe good for you, too, Mister Man.”
Celeste rolled her eyes. Nikita cackled and swatted at her. Larry wore an embarrassed expression; Frank a curious one.
Celeste reached over and tugged lightly at her sister"s weave. “You just get these extensions, Nikita?”
Nikita covered her mouth in an oh-mygod expression. “How you gonna put my business out there on the street like that, girl?” Recovering quickly, she pecked Frank on the cheekand said, “I"m"a be in the bathroom for a minute, baby.” She then made a grand production of a simple act like walking down the hall.
First of all, Nikita rarely just “walked.” She moved from point “A” to point “B” in a pronounced strut that hypnotized men with the pendulous motion of her big, round booty. The bright yellow miniskirt and halter top she wore tonight only added to the spectacle. It was a wonder she didn"t catch pneumonia, from the way she dressed.
Celeste excused herself, and discretely slipped away. When Nikita emerged from the bathroom, Celeste was waiting in ambush.
“What is going on, Nikita?”
Nikita took a step back, looked her sister up-and-down, then forced a laugh as she said, “Say what?”
“So you"ve got „jungle fever" now, too?”
“It"s the white folks who get jungle fever, Celeste. We get…hmm. I"m not sure what you call what we get.”
“After all the hell you and Mama gave me about white boys,” Celeste said. “Now you"re with Frank?”
“Mmm-hmm,” Nikita intoned, without the slightest self-consciousness or awareness of her own hypocrisy. “But he"s not just any white boy. Look at him: he"s fine.”
Celeste shook her head, still unsure if she could believe all this. “What happened to the Blackness Quotient and all that mess? Are you really my sister, or some podperson? What"s got into you?”
Nikita flashed her 5,000 watt smile again and did her little slut dance. “Mmm. That white boy gonna get into me. All up into me.”
It took huge willpower not to slap the twinkle out of Nikita"s eyes. “You slept with him?”
Nikita cackled some more. “Not yet, baby-girl. But we gonna take care of business. Bam!”
Celeste felt dizzy.
“Jungle Feva…” Nikita sang, as she slut-danced some more. “"Course sometimes I wonder if he"s a monk or something.” She ran her hands down over her curves, seductively. “Never met a man who could take „no" for an answer before.I might have to get the ball rollin" myself.”
Celeste stared at her, disbelieving.
“He"s been looking for me all his life,” Nikita said. “And now I found him.”
“Oh, he"s been looking for you?”
“Damn skippy.”
“Is that what he told you?”
“Not in so many words,” Nikita said. “But it"s true.”
“You"re a piece of work, Nikita.”
“Hey, you said he was just a mutual friend of Shauna and her white boy,” Nikita said, defensive from Celeste"s withering glare. “He was free and available. You ain"t attracted to him, right?”
“How did it…” Celeste swallowed and breathed deep, struggling to keep her composure. “How did you two get together?"
Nikita shrugged. “He called me. We went out. And he knows how to handle all this class, too. He talks to me with respect. He opens doors for me. He knows a African queen when he sees one.”
“How did he get your number?”
“I gave it to him.”
“Since when did you start giving white boys your number?”
“Since that birthday party. He got all fresh on me and at first I was like, „I don"t do that." But I watched him after that and you know what? I was like, „hey"!”
Celeste always considered that falsetto “hey,” pronounced as if it had two syllables, as the mating call of the horny hood rat.
Meet my sister Nikita, the horny hood rat.
“Does Mama know?” Celeste asked.
Nikita"s smile faded, fast. “Hell naw. And she don"t need to know, neither.” Now she put a hand on her hip and made that snake-like shimmy of her head from side-toside. “And why are you all up in my grille, anyway? How you gonna interrogate me?”
“Oh, I don"t know,” Celeste retorted. “Maybe because you"re a bigot and a hypocrite.”
“I ain"t no bigot. I"m down with the swirl, girl. This is two-thousandwhatever, Celeste. I"m flowin" with the times, is all. You should be happy I see it the way you do, now.”
“Why don"t you let me fix you up with some nice, quality black men?” Celeste snarled, then stormed away.
“Everything all right?” Larry asked, when Celeste returned to him.
She plastered a big, fake smile on her face and said. “Of course. Let"s go get a drink, shall we? There"s plenty of alcohol around and I hear the second movie is more fun with than without.”
Indeed, people were already stinko. Many of them had left their seats and Larry observed that they could trade their bar stools for more comfortable furniture if they hurried. When they returned to the living room, to Celeste"s horror, Larry picked a seat on the couch right next to Frank and Nikita.
Frank leaned across both Nikita and Larry to ask, “So when do you want to do the field trip?”
“I"m not sure,” Celeste said. “Maybe between testing and Christmas break?”
Frank shrugged and stood. “Everybody ready for the second feature?”
He was answered by a chorus of drunken shouts as guests flocked back into the living room.”
Celeste intended, at one point, to get drunk herself. She was feeling tipsy now, but had good reason to fear she might become nauseous before the alcohol made her forget about Frank and her sister. Half an hour into the movie, she asked Larry to take her home.
Larry gave her the strangest look, but gathered his keys, her purse and their coats, then escorted her outside to his car.
The ride back to her place was awkward and silent. When he pulled into her driveway, he said, “I know better than to ask for some pussy. Good night.”
“Excuse me?” sh
e slurred.
He shook his head, a disgusted look on his face. “I get it, now. You never want to go out, unless Frank is there. Then you spend half the night staring at him. But your sister"s already got him. Do all the women in your family go after whitey like you two?”
She stared dumbly at him, her jaw slack.
“Shit,” he said. “Your daddy"s probably white.”
“Don"t start getting up in my family"s business,” she warned, suddenly shrill. “You don"t know anything about my family! Both my parents are black, by-theway. I"m just as black as you. Maybe blacker.”
“I"m a hardworking, honest man,” he said. “I"m a good father. I was a good husband. I"m not a drug dealer or a thief or a deadbeat, or any of the stereotypes. Am I not educated enough for you? Not wealthy enough? Or just the wrong color? What the hell is it you want, anyway?”
Celeste swallowed the anger she"d been wanting to let loose all night, and said, “I"m sorry, Larry. This is not about skin color, or social class, education, or any of that stuff. I can see you"re a good father… I can see you"re for real. It"s just that…I don"t think I"ll ever love you the way I need to love somebody. That"s all it comes down to.”
“Get out of my car,” he said.
Celeste did. She entered her townhouse, locked the door, then slid to the floor right there, groaning, “What the hell kind of day was this?”
19 Thanksgiving came and went. Celeste spent it with Mama, and managed to be more civil toward Nikita. Thankfully, the subject of Frank never came up.
Some days Celeste handled her situation fairly well. Other days she felt hysterical, utterly alone, and just wanted to hibernate for a few years.
On one of the good days, she put together the field trip, and called Frank to give him the date.
It was set.
She had no idea what to expect on their next meeting—either from him or herself. If it weren"t for her students and how excited they were about this trip, she would have chickened out altogether.
As it turned out, there was no meeting. Frank had left his underlings in charge of the tour, and didn"t even show up at the office that day. Celeste didn"t know whether to feel relief or disappointment or anger or offense. Her students had a great time, behaved themselves, and learned something. That was what was important.
She called Frank to thank him. Their conversation was cordial, but stilted. She hadn"t known what to say, or how to say it.
Celeste spent all of her free time at home, alone, and did a lot of soul searching.
Overall, she was a good person, with plenty of good qualities. But she had developed a cynical, cold side since college. Or maybe she"d had it, all along, passed down from her mother…and her freshman year just brought it to the surface.
That side of herself she didn"t like. It had to do with unforgiveness, probably. She hadn"t forgiven Frank. But worse, she couldn"t forgive herself for being so stupid. Now she was having trouble forgiving her sister when, honestly, Nikita hadn"t done anything wrong. She was guilty only of getting with a man who was available, and setting aside her own bigotry.
Amidst all the soul-searching, Celeste did plenty of reading. Then, one day when she was completely caught up on her class work, she sat down at her computer, opened her word processor and began writing.
She didn"t know if she was writing the Great American Novel, or some kind of literary self-therapy, but she had a couple chapters done when Shauna called her one night, crying hysterically.
“What is it, girlfriend?” Celeste asked.
“It"s Miles,” Shauna said, in between sniffles.
“What about him?”
“He"s gone!” she wailed. Then she lost it. In between her sobbing and hitching, she stammered out the gist of the story: they had a fight; he took the motorcycle and left without telling her where he was going. He"d been gone for hours, missed supper and wouldn"t answer his phone.
Celeste sympathized, but didn"t know how she could help.
“I called Frank,” Shauna stammered. “He said he doesn"t know where he is. Do you think he"s covering for him?”
This was all quite disturbing, coming from a member of the perfect, world"s happiest couple.
“Shauna, what was the fight about?”
*** Frank was right about Nikita in one respect: she helped him get over his jealousy and get back to work on his videos.
Their first date was at the movie theater and he got to first and second base without really trying. She wanted to go dancing at a club and that was their second date. Their next date was a Saturday at a water park and she was dynamite in a bikini.
Soaking wet from all the rides, Nikita"s nipples denting her top to send him lewd messages, they took a break by floating in a big inner tube around the moat. When they got to a shady stretch where a bunch of unoccupied inner tubes had collected, she instigated some slap-and-tickle, during which their tube capsized. Nikita stood up from her dunk laughing, but also complaining about getting her weave wet.
“It"s your own fault,” he said, laughing himself.
“I"m gonna kick your muscle-bound ass!” she threatened, wading toward him with arms outstretched like a TV wrestler, as if she could dunk him by force.
He caught her wrists as she stepped in close. “What was that?" he taunted. “You"re gonna do what?”
“Let me go and you"ll see.”
“Why would I want to do that?” he asked, still laughing.
She stepped in even closer, her eyelids lowering halfway. “Because,” she said, voice turning sultry, “you might like what happens next.”
Her face pushed up into his personal space and their lips met. She needed no warming up, inviting his tongue into her mouth and sucking on it gently. His hands released her wrists and slid down her back. Her arms encircled his neck.
They pulled back from the kiss and gazed at one another. She looked almost perfect. “I liked that,” he said. “But I don"t know if I"d like you trying to kick my ass.”
“Did I say „kick"?” she asked, one hand slipping down behind him into the waistdeep water. “What I really want to do is…”
Her mouth covered his again, and her hand grabbed his buttock, pulling it toward her so that their loins ground together underwater. She growled into his mouth and finished the kiss with gentle nibbles on his lower lip. Her hand slid around to the front and rubbed deliberately over his aching erection. She held his gaze with hungry, impudent eyes.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Fire away,” he said.
“This thing has been hard all day while you were looking at me,” she said. “How much you gonna let go to waste before you do something about it?”
It was all he could do not to take her right there and then. Still, he had every intention of spending the rest of the day and all that night in bed with her when they got back to town.
As that opportunity grew closer, though, he was consumed by a restless, uneasy spirit.
It didn"t feel right.
Nikita was not the right one.
Sure, he"d had plenty of cheap, meaningless sex before. And most men could never get enough. But he was having a harder time compartmentalizing any more. Sex without love seemed more and more hollow. Not that he really knew much about love—other than that he"d never experienced it.
She had surprise in her tone when he said goodbye without following up on the erotic promise of before. He was probably crazy, but Nikita was not the one he wanted to share something so sacred with.
It was not Nikita that haunted him in his dreams that night, either.
As painful as it was, Frank avoided sealing the deal every time they saw each other, though he had some awfully close calls. Nikita knew how to turn a man on.
The first few times she asked to borrow money, he had refused and she let it drop. But she became increasingly overbearing about it and at one point, came right out and said, “Damn, I know you got money, but you"re as tight as a street nigga. I thought white menweren"t
afraid to slide a girl some change.”
That evolved into their first fight. After half a day of ugly bickering, she stormed away and they didn"t speak for two days.
After their second squabble about money, he could see another emotional roller coaster on the horizon. He laid down the law: he was not a bank, a gold mine or a sugar daddy. If that"s what she wanted, she had to look elsewhere. She tried to resume the argument and he walked out on her.
The next night she showed up at his door. They hadn"t suffered a knockdown-drag-out since.
He got his muse back, but unfortunately couldn"t produce much with all his free time spent with Nikita.
The worst part was the guilt.
Even though he avoided sex with her, it still felt wrong. Even just dating, it felt like he was using her as a rebound. A cure for the aching inside him. Aching for a woman for whom he lost his chance forever. Ever since then, and now more than ever, cruel fate kept teasing him with her doppelgangers.
Nikita was not the original; just a lookalike. The physical resemblance was strong enough that this was easy to forget sometimes. But at other times it was impossible not to notice this was not the woman he yearned for. Nikita was the life of any party, but one-on-one it was painfully obvious how vapid, banal and superficial she could be.
He finally insisted on some time spent apart, so he could get back to work on his projects. At first she took offense to this, but became less threatened when he offered to put her in one of the videos.
The Golliwogs had a song called “Low Center of Gravity,” with lyrics most listeners didn"t understand. But Frank understood: It was all encoded appreciation for the voluptuous female form. He cast Violet, Nikita, and another sexy actress as his fly girls, and put together a simple little plot interjected with several scenes of the girls dancing in sync with each other.
He was working on this one evening when Shauna called. She sounded strained and uptight. “Is Miles over there?”
“No. Why?”
“Do you know where he is?”
“No. What"s up, Shauna?”
“Could you check outside on your street and see if his motorcycle is parked somewhere?”
“What? Shauna, what"s going on?”
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